Toraldo Francesco

The expressivity of Francesco Toraldo intertwines with figurative narrations that seem to come not so much from a pre-established conception, as rather from a passion led by memories. Through the artist’s biography what emerges is a rebellious spirit, considered that he decided not to complete the academic studies, which have been useful, however, as base for apprenticeship. His true master was his father Enzo, a painter capable to instill into him an instinctive love toward a calibrated and intense figuration. The expressive capabilities of Francesco Toraldo reveal themselves in its artworks with the vibrant effects of pure primary colours. He is unwilling to control his pictorial fantasy, therefore he represents the truth through the filter of emotions. Immediately apparent are his capabilities and sensivity for the manifestation of the detail in a visual context where prevails an expressionism marked, in some cases, by a post-romantic smoothness. The observer sees an artist who has undoubtedly assimilated fundamental knowledge from the museum and the art of the last century, not only fauve chromatism, which here seems as first artistic reference, but also a visual exploration of the post-war German Expressionism.
In order to transfigure what is distinguishable and then to understand through an imaginative filter, this artist draws on an intense colorism animated by wide backgrounds, which represents a persistent element of a poetic language of great density with a clear and concise narrative enunciation.
The Toraldo’s gestuality appears through strong palette knife strokes, performing a chromatic counterpoint that results in a clear pureness balance between masses of colours.
The artist meditates on his artwork with deep emotional involvement, dialoguing with a pictorial matter that stems from a vigilant state of consciousness while listening his own inner being. His artworks about sails blown by the wind, jazzmen, nude female bodies, characterized by immediacy of sign and essentiality of painting, seem to originate straight from the colour, without the need of preparatory drawings.
Only the colour seems to be capable to open all the emotional horizons of his vision. The love for nature and human figure modulates musical rhythms that come back and break out in the colours, becoming sound and harmony in the specific visual representation of trumpet and sax players. Furthermore, this talented painter of skies, seas, powerful visual images, needs to diversify his favourite themes through the filter of visionariness able to praise the passion with shades of nostalgia, thus avoiding hyperbole and banality.
The visual feelings, which come from his selective remembrance inspiring each new composition, are the results of a very poetic expressivity, since it is able to return an emotional function to the values of depiction. Thus, the pictorial sensitivity acts as a focused synthesis, which becomes deep through harmonic tone-on-tone contrasts.
The analysis of the pictorial moment finds his narrative end, which represents the detail of the beauty of perceptivity, letting its secret free and exalting it through the paths of harmony.