Santo Tomaino. Epic painting

Born in Calabra in 1954, Santo Tomaino, an artist working in Turin, since the 70s focused his research on the medium of painting, even in its most intriguing aspects, and on the return to figurative art, with references to symbolic values and to the American action painting. A selection of major paintings drawn from the latest series of paintings and a series of preparatory papers will be on display at the Museo Carlo Bilotti: for the first time in Rome, an exhibition that highlights the long artistic career of the artist.
The protagonists of Santo Tomaino’s tales are a fabulous and rich bestiary along with other mythological and arcane creatures, but a mythology plunged into contemporary or the artist’s history. The protagonists of these new myths move among us, against the backdrop of our cities, in the fields of battles fought during old or current wars, or they occupy the landscape of his childhood memories, the forests of the Sila, the land of which he was raised. The constant and imaginative interweaving of myth and reality, the use of metaphor is the method developed by the artist to retrieve the narrative idea of the pictorial language.