Artwork by David Tremlett

The “sala degli archi”, or room of arches, on the ground floor of the Palazzo Marchionale (Baronial Palace) continues the storytelling of the Castle’s many centuries of history through the permanent installation of the work of English artist David Tremlett, one of the best-known names on the contemporary art scene.

David Tremlett was at Tate Britain as early as 1972 and at the MoMA in New York the following year. He is an artist and traveller who views Italy as essential to his identity: “Italy is a land of sweetness, of sounds and colours,” David Tremlett states, “where Giotto and Piero della Francesca painted the most amazing walls in history.”

He brought the same passion to Formigine Castle, with the commission of restoring an identity to a fortress which had been stripped of its decorations. So David Tremlett responded to the walls of the Castle with a work that expresses its history, its soul and its community.

The five wall drawings reference the elegant decorative frieze with heraldic emblems conserved in the Clock Tower, and establish a perfect dialogue with their antique predecessors without sacrificing their contemporary language.
For the Sala degli Archi, Tremlett has created drawings portraying a dance of beautiful, colourful abstract shapes: trapezia, circles and rectangles, whole or in sections, which give architectural form to the walls, and reveal their internal dynamism with a strikingly three-dimensional effect.
The English artist’s painting technique is all his own. He uses coloured pigments he discovered in India. The bright yet impalpable powders are ideally suited to his idea of art as a journey and as weightless, while also evoking the Medieval taste for bright colours, which symbolised beauty and prosperity.