Gaetano Tranchino is a Sicilian painter known for his depictions of Sicily. Tranchino has exhibited his work both in Italy and internationally.[1]
Self-identifying as being a poor student and somewhat lacking formal education, Tranchino is included among Italian Naïve artists. He was initially fascinated by promotional film posters and film stills depicting fragments taken from a larger story.[2]
Biography
Gaetano Tranchino was born in Syracuse, Sicily in 1938. A close friend of the late writer Leonardo Sciascia and the photographer Ferdinando Scianna, Tranchino has exhibited throughout Italy and beyond since 1964.
"Casa azzurra con giardino / Blue house with a Garden" by Gaetano Tranchino
Critical responses
Tranchino uses bold and saturated hues when painting, often referencing Sicily, especially the post-war period of his childhood and youth. Motifs of departing ships (often under a full plume of steam), solitary readers and walkers, and landscapes of rural or small-city life, are repeated images in his body of work.
According to Sciascia, "Tranchino, à la Stendhal, à la Savinio, does not work… he enjoys himself, that is to say, he paints with delight, with pleasure, as on a prolonged vacation – so very prolonged –, continuous and intense enough to absorb his whole life."[3]
Writing in The Irish Times of Tranchino’s 2010 solo exhibition at the Rua/Red Gallery in Tallaght, art critic Aidan Dunne stated: "He uses intense yellows, pinks, reds, greens and blues in richly textured, jewel-like masses, often accentuated by strong tonal contrasts. If he wasn’t such a good painter it could all go horribly wrong, but he is actually a fine, sensitive painter, and the paintings are not only attractive but capable of withstanding sustained attention: they’d be good to live with, in other words. Tranchino’s place of memory is tinged with the sadness of loss, but as formulated, it’s an almost pleasurable sadness."[4]
