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Biography
   
 
Angelo Vadala's artwork brings together the best of European masters technique and Orientalist and Neoclassic awe-inspiring feelings. Angelo Vadalá is a full-fledged artist alongside the Florence Renaissance tradition. His artworks range from oil paintings to drawings, from sculptures to frescos. He is also an accomplished and sought after portrait artist. His work has been shown in prestigious exhibitions all over the world.
 
 
Biography
 
 
Angelo Vadalà was born in Messina. He started painting five decades ago, when he was only 12. At the age of 18, Vadalà left Sicily to live and study in Florence, officially to attend university and study architecture. But after two years of study at the Florence University of Architecture, Vadalà found he was distracted by what the many museums of that beautiful city contained, and not by the stone and wood that housed the art. His desire to capture a movement or a moment in time on canvas or in clay, called him from the study of the building of structures. His strongest need was to capture the human form, in all its beauty and majesty, and become a part of the long legacy of Italian artists that came before him. The city of Florence itself became his inspiration; Leonardo DaVinci, Velàzquez and Caravaggio, his teachers.
 
 
 
From his study of architecture, Vadalà had received a foundation in the art and technique of draftsmanship. Combined with his innate artistic talent and his personal study of art in the museums and churches of Florence, he paid the same scrupulous attention to mastering the techniques of painting, as it applied to the human form. One example of Vadalà's discipline and determination to achieve excellence was the enormous time he dedicated to studying hands. He described these early efforts as critical to subsequent artistic success, often saying, “Hands have millions of positions, if you are able to draw hands well, you can draw everything”
 
 
 
Throughout the 1960’s, Vadalà continued his study of art on his own. At the end of the ‘60’s, he went to New York where he was influenced by the new realism movement and the new American figurative painting style. Over the next decade and a half, he developed his personal style, based on technical perfection and dream themes. In the 1980’s he began to explore neo-classic art, Oriental art and romantic myths. Today, he is considered one of the best contemporary portrait painters in Italy. At an international level he has painted great figures of the cultural scene, show business and the world of finance, political figures, and the aristocracy of Europe. Some of his subjects have included Cinzano, Rod Stieger, Jonny Hallyday, the President of Senegal. He has received awards in many art competitions throughout Italy as well as numerous commissions for public works and for the Catholic Church. Vadalà’s work his been included in museum shows throughout his native Italy and in the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
 
 
 
Today, Vadalà lives and works in Florence and Milan. He often visits and shows in the United States. His medium is most often oil on canvas, although he often works in pastel and pencil.
 
 
 
While Vadalà continues to take portrait commissions and paint unique and masterful figurative works, he has recently begun a series of city scenes (Venice, Jerusalem) in his precise and original style. The cityscapes are magical and extraordinary, yet immediately identifiable. They capture a light and mood that is timeless and beautiful, allowing the viewer to be transported to an idyllic place, based on reality that is better than any dream. The world he creates in his paintings is a place we would all like to be.
 
 
Artist's statement
 
"To speak of Paintings and in addition of one's own is difficult and often not very spontaneous. Engagements, choices, values, ideals make no difference. These things are updated and only point out to one's prejudices.
But I am sure of a couple of things I will always like. Sensual pleasures (to eat, to touch, to feel, etc.), beauty (of bodies and nature) and art (painting, sculpture and architecture).
In painting what I like today is all, or just about, that doesn't fall within the officiousness of Modern Art.
I like those who are left out, excluded by prejudices, that fashion calls mannered or decadent. I like their showy talent, the great opulence and glorious mastery of their works.
I like involution, the upsetting of the notions of time and space, the Unheimliche that emanates intellectual disorientation.
So I like Bocklin, the pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt, Klimt together with Klinger and von Stuck, the composed Puvis de Chavannes, the elegant Khnopff, the sybarite Moreau, the victorian Alma-Tadema and the italian Sartorio.
Art is made of thousands of possibilities and contradictions, one should abstain from the tendency, too general and too easy, of classifying and decreeing on the spot which are the vital statements of our time and which is the right road to follow."


Angelo Vadalà
 
 
 
Comments about Vadalà
 
We believe without any doubt that proposing a large review of Angelo Vadalà's work of art can be a significant and awaited event for all those interested in art and know how to recognize an artist for his basic and prestigious role in the contemporary cultural view through his wide activity...
We hope that Vadalà's work, amply recognized by the international critique, allows further careful examination of his singular creative experience and also offers an effective and fascinating view towards this poetic universe where men and their myths rediscover primitive beauty and the once-had self respect.


Pro-Loco Castelnuovo Garfagnana, 1998
 
 
 
 
It is indeed hard today to be a painter, and sticking to tradition, as Angelo Vadalà does with proud originality, is nothing less than heroic. Exceptionally talented as a painter and sculptor, unique in his drawings, full of cultured and fascinating contaminations, he moves through the history of art exploiting every possible and practically feasible reference. An eclectic artist, he has been a step ahead of all the cultural games in the famous return to order, demonstrating that originality is worthless if it lacks talent.
A. Vadalà's painting is not realism retold, nor is it the surrealism of the absurd and the impossible. It is a symbolic ideal that lends itself to a variety of interpretations without ever lapsing into doubt or banality. It is improbable, but not impossible. Myth is hidden behind subtle games, never lapsing into a tale told and described directly, ready instead to bewilder us from a cultural point of view and perturb our notions of time and space.
Vadalà is a portrait painter out of the ordinary. The extremely high level he reaches in his portraits combines a magical faithfulness with originality in composition. And it is this that makes Angelo Vadalà one of the finest portrait painters in this historical moment of time.


Tom Barnes, Gallery Owner 1998