ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
Native of Milan,Italy, art has been present in my life
since I was born.
I believe in the improvisation and spontaneity of gestural painting and free
brushstrokes as a way to convey the beauty of figurative and non-figurative
images and provoke an emotive response. I strive, through my works, to communicate excitement using color,
transparency and organic materials as Japanese papers, cardboards, newspapers, burlap, etc, as a
way to visually enrich the content in my paintings.
"I have decided to host in my Foundation the paintings of Tiziana Epis after I noticed and admired the decision of the style and the vigour of the colour.
Without any doubt her artistic growth has been strongly influenced by the bright environment loaded of hues like the one of the American desert that surrounds her house in Arizona. In her paintings an innate talent has found an easy expression of freedom from themes clearly figurative, themes that the artist has skilfully hidden under the transparencies of collages and enriched with a lively and personal palette. At the same time, in the fifty drawing presented at my Foundation, we can notice the confidence of the hand of an artist technically well preapared, who with a single stroke, without any separation of the charcoal from the paper, gives a perfect profile of opulent woman with perfect forms.
In my Foundation I often hosted young artists, at their debut, and I have several times contributed to the launching of young talents. Tiziana Epis is not a newcomer in fine art, but she desired a prestigious starting point, for a world wide tour of exhibitions in Europe, and I ,with my Foundation, have been glad to offer it to her.
The Raffaele De Grada presentation and the De Michelis comments made in a conference held in the showroom where the exhibit "I colori e i collage di Tiziana Epis" has been hosted, have indeed confirmed that the choice cannot be more correct and that once again I have identified an artist of sure success.
My intentions, in the Foundation future, are focused to find a definitive and perennial residence for my sculptures and for the works of artists, who in several years, left here a mark of their passage. I'm sure that the Tiziana's one will continue to raise emotions thanks to the confidence of her stroke and to the courage of her colors"
MARCO MANTOVANI
" I'm here to present Tiziana Epis and I should say that I like this artist, in the sense that I saw immediately that there are in her the qualities of a painter. And this is very important. What does it mean? When we put together one colour with another one and we give a tonality to the painting, the painter does this with a criteria that is not only improvisation but also study. So, each of these paintings has value for what is the ability of the artist to put the colours together in the way that the whole complex has a meaning....From her painting we can understand that Epis, facing the reality has found the way that allows to forget it and to assume a vision more general and more emotive. She is arrived , with an ability that I should say quite exceptional, to make these last works where, playing with the rice paper, with a collage that never prevails to the painting itself, she succeeds to make works that give pleasure. Great pleasure. And this is the point : the art should, in first place, give us pleasure as well as be an element of decor in an environment, in a situation. ... From the time Kandinsky said that " it's useless to paint from the window some carriages that go by. It's enough to assume the general concept and give it back with a pictoric fantasy", there has been really a lot of abstract painting.. But when the art history seemed heading firmly this way we find artists like Matisse, like Picasso, like so many others that do have value and are instead absolutely figurative. So, our century is not the century of the abstract but the one where all these positions meet and cross each other.
...On the other room I saw a painting that recalled me Rothko, an American artist of great name, who used to paint these planes of colour, one close to the other, making of them his artistic flag. Instead we see that Epis left these ideas, that were coming from her good knowledge of the American fine art, and embraced a concept more European of the painting, more elaborate, more refined like the one coming from the great masters (Braque etc.) This is why, looking to these paintings, you should have the conscience that you are looking ..to an artist who has indeed elaborated a concept of style and has carried it to these last experiences that are really positive. For exemple with the red painting the third one from the end of the room ("America I, ndr). Here is Tiziana Epis!"
RAFFAELE DE GRADA
"...Coming back to the research subject that the painter Tiziana Epis, that I had the pleasure to know, her painting is tied to the search of "Informel". It's connected therefore to the big subject of Informel, born in the Unites States in the '40s at Woodstock with De Kooning and then transferred in Italy. The "Informel" was binded to the literature...literature that has been written in France by Jean Paul Sartre.
...Here : Epis has collected in America this school, this way of performing and representing. Her paintings are islands that are joined together as compages, connections of situations realized with the contributions of different materials, not only of painting as such, but through the usage of Japanese transparent rice paper and large collages.
When I entered this room I saw this painting ("Pink and Blue", ndr) that remembered me the painting of a great French of Russian origin whose name was Sergej Poliakoff. He was a great artist, one of the greatest artist of the European "Informel". Now, Epis has collected and carried, through the exibit at the "Fondazione Mantovani", followed by the one at the "Galleria Sargadelos" and today here at the Consulate, she carried these pages, that are pages of memory of this fracture between "Informel" and figurative, of this williness of recovery of the man dignity.
...Today is easy to say:" I do research and I can demonstrate to you that my painting, even if not pleasant, is interesting and intelligent". All this can be said and done but it's the perseverance and the work that Epis succeeded to do, to put in comparison one painting with the other that becomes, after all, the judgement of the other paintings...
....the critic point is never expressed by the critic himself that does it as profession, but it's expressed in the whole set of works of the painter.. A work of art can judge another work of art..I wanted to say with this that I congratulate you, dear Tiziana, very much and I invite you to continue in this search. We will stay in touch. And at the next exhibit I want to be the one to present you at the vernissage...
LORENZO QUINTILIO BONINI