The departure of Aldo Tambellini … the experimental black fanatic!

At the age of 90, Aldo Tambellini, the pioneering American-Italian artist and film director who was obsessed with the color black, died of complications after undergoing surgery in a Cambridge, Massachusetts hospital. The deceased will also be mentioned for developing what he called “electromedia,” which is the combination of multiple forms including flash, dance, film, poetry and slide shows. Commenting on this news, the British newspaper “The Guardian” quoted Stuart Kummer, curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as saying that “we have lost a giant.”

Tambellini was born in Syracuse, New York, but grew up in Italy during the chaos of World War II. After his return to the United States, he began his artistic career as a sculptor and painter, and studied at the Universities of Syracuse and Notre Dame. But it was a staple of New York’s Lower East Side art scene in the early 1960s, when it began to push boundaries, presenting immersive multimedia presentations and opening galleries in the East Village, showcasing the work of cutting-edge filmmakers. . Among them are “Kenneth Unger” and “Yayoi Kusama”.
Tampellini’s obsession with the Negro stemmed from his experience in the war, when he found himself mesmerized by the African American soldiers, or the Buffalo soldiers, who came to liberate his Italian town, Guamo. In his manifesto published in 1967 entitled Black is the consciousness of a new reality, he wrote: “I see black very clearly as the beginning of all things … There was black before there was light in the whole universe. There is black inside the uterus before the baby is born. Black is not the opposite of white; It is a state of being. “
The color was political for Tamplini, who linked him to the Black Power movement and the civil rights struggles that broke out in the United States. The hectic nature of his work often coincided with the political atmosphere of the time. He would paint black on glass slides or celluloid strips and then burn, scratch, or pierce the snails on the surface. Circles was another recurring theme in these works, which he called lumagrams.
Despite his rich experience in innovation and experimentation, it was only during the last decade of his life that Tampellini won accolades in the mainstream art world. In 2012, the Tate Modern in London organized its own retrospective, Retracing Black.