The big Po overflow (1951) was an event that characterized a great fortune for the river landscape theme during the following years. This occurrence could explain Tino Aroldi's artistic language development: maybe this flood showed the artist the river and its magnificent landscape. The spectacular and disquieting water expanse, followed by the slow emergence of trees, landforms and reshaped sandbars must have left a deep mark in his memory.
The great emotion was not transformed immediately in painting: the small paintings in Chiarismo style produced on that occasion, as Flooding Po, are simple tests compared to the future works. Aroldi's most typical style is defined during the 70s, approaching a technique characterized by atmospheric values that capture the air and the light.
The illustration is tied to a realistic view of space and the gaze gets a more personal and intimate interpretation of the same setting. The latter appears transformed into something else, where the endless and material sky dominates water, almost blending together. Tino Aroldi uses the direction of the brush stroke to make the sky atmospheric: he changes the perception of the colour catching the external light through vague optical illusions, without using chiaroscuro method.
The painter acquires some colours that he will never abandon (pearl ones, such as grey-light blue, viridian, violet) and surpasses any perspective representation: the space is reproduced on the surface through the right dose of colours and tones, rather than a drawing or an illusion perspective that penetrate the background to go into the distance.
Tino Aroldi's conclusive landscape is an extreme formal summary, which is resolved in a composition of abstract surfaces, but it is also a symbolic landscape that overcomes the visual optic dimension to become the landscape of the soul.
Donated by Carla Aroldi, 2007
