Doménico CV Talarico: Artist and Collector

Beauty is Desire in Disguise #02, 50 x 60 cm (2020).

Doménico  CV Talarico is a collector. Obsessed with the need to preserve forgotten objects:  furniture, trinkets, photographs.  Talarico travels not to walk the beaten track, or hop from one tourist spot to another, but to visit flea markets, vintage shops, to dig through the abandoned objects that once decorated the lives of forgotten people.   

Living proof that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure,  Talarico’s  artistic practice was born out of his collecting habit. A self-taught artist, Talarico was trained in design rather than art. The artist began his career making watercolour illustrations, but was ultimately unfulfilled by the work. It was the impulse purchase of a vintage chest that transformed his practice and his career. Talarico opened the chest to discover that it was filled with old photographs. Being an avid collector, Talarico kept them. It was a photograph from this collection of images that the artist first painted. The decision to paint from the picture of a stranger transformed  Talarico’s  practice.   

After Silence There is a Cold Breeze #07, 50 x 60 cm (2020).

Muted tones, clean lines and blocks of colour echo the artist’s early work as an illustrator; however, his subject area has evolved. Identity is  Talarico’s  principal concern, in painting from the images of strangers, Talarico serves his audience a reminder of the fragility of identity, how quickly who we are and what we do can fade into history. The photographs that Talarico collects are chronicles of people long since forgotten. By recording their likeness in paint, Talarico attempts to preserve the memories  of  dead strangers – often without even knowing their name.    

The artist works by taking aspects of photographs he likes, often a subject or several subjects, and then placing them in a new context, against solid colour, within imagined interiors or landscapes. Painting from black and white portraits, Talarico takes liberties with colour, but prefers  to use  muted tones to preserve the sense of nostalgia offered by the original photographs. Playing with varying degrees of abstraction,  Talarico’s  work bounces between carefully rendered figurative portraits and roughly painted ‘cartoons.’ These ‘cartoons’ form an essential part of the artist’s process;  they are  painted sketches, which  he calls  ‘mini  paintings’. Whilst these mini paintings are a step in the development of larger, figurative portraits, they also contribute significantly to the depth of  Talarico’s  oeuvre. Throughout art history, the artist’s sketch has remained relevant; it offers an insight into an artist’s process, the development of colour and composition. Talarico’s  mini paintings show how  his  training as an illustrator has influenced his later work.   

Talarico paints unknown subjects as though they were close friends. Hyper-focused portraits make for an intimate interaction between the subject and the viewer. The fact that the identity of each subject is itself a mystery is not immediately evident. It is with ‘masked’ portraits that Talarico alludes to the enigmatic nature of his subject’s identities. With these portraits, several of which appear in two of the artist’s newer series;  Blurring Boundaries Between Far  And  Away  (2019) and  Beauty is Desire in Disguise  (2020), the subject’s faces are rendered entirely white and eyeless, they are equipped with only a mouth and cheeks. The result is a far cry from the intimate portraits Talarico usually paints. The ‘mask’ gives the subjects an uncanny ghost-like appearance, alluding to the fact that their identity is indeed  confined to  the past and that the person in the original image is in all likelihood, long dead.   

Blurring Boundaries Between Far and Away #03, 50 x 60 cm (2019).

 Talarico’s  portraits preserve images of people past and bring their likeness into the realm of contemporary art. Yet, the identity of his subjects remains a mystery, serving as a reminder that identity itself is inherently fragile; that who we are and the lives we have built for ourselves will, one day, be swept away by time. 

For more artwork and information about the artist, please visit his MADE IN BED Emerging Artist profile.

Imagery courtesy of the artist. 

Katie Lynch, 

Contributor, MADE IN BED