Painting |Tarcisio Merati

Tarcisio Merati was born in 1934 in Bonate Sopra, near Bergamo. He rebels very soon against his own family life conditions of extreme poverty. He loses his father when he is a little child. His mother remarries with an uncouth man who often beats him. After elementary school and professional training, Tarcisio works first in a bakery then as a bricklayer. When he is 25 years old he goes through a very intense psychiatric collapse: the misery, the frequent quarrels with his family and a job he doesn’t like, all that makes him very vulnerable. In a sort of omnipotence delirious, he reacts choosing a new social role. In 1959 he is hospitalized for the first time into Bergamo psychiatric hospital and he goes back and forth from the madhouse with diagnosis of “psychosis and mentally handicap”. In 1970 he discovered painting and until 1983 his production was enormous. He attends the art studio from morning to evening and he has no other interest than painting. His world is filled with images, with his own personal alphabet, made of wonder and amazement, in an explosion of colors. And the drawings, from the graphic sign, become “small birds”, “small machines”, “small airplanes”. He died in 1995.