FARFA, Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini (Trieste 1879/1881 – Sanremo 1964)
An eclectic artist and a complete intellectual, the work of Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini, known as Farfa, encompasses an extraordinary variety of forms of expression, including paintings, works on paper, ceramics, and poetry, each bearing witness to his volcanic artistic personality. It is, however, within the realm of Futurist aesthetics—into which he introduced a quirky and ironic vein—that Farfa’s creativity reached its peak, making him one of the most prominent and enigmatic figures of Second Futurism, strategically positioned between the Ligurian and the Turin schools.
He made his debut in 1910 during the Futurist Evening held at the Politeama Rossetti Theatre in Trieste. In 1919 he met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and, in 1924, took part in the First Avant-Garde Exhibition in Turin. In the same city, the following year, he participated in a Futurist exhibition and established close relationships with Fillia and Pippo Oriani, with whom he founded the Turin Futurist Group. From 1928 to 1958 he lived in Savona, where he carried out a fundamental part of his artistic activity. Together with Tullio d’Albisola, he founded the Ligurian Futurist Group.
Among the distinctive features of his figurative production are the cartopitture — collages made from colored paper, imbued with an imagination bordering on nonsense — while his ceramic production occupies a leading role and contributes significantly to the development of what became known as crepuscular Futurism. At the end of the 1950s, by then elderly and living in isolation in Sanremo, he experienced a second artistic youth thanks to the interest shown by Surrealists and representatives of the international avant-garde, including Arturo Schwarz, Enrico Baj, and Asger Jorn, as well as poets and intellectuals. Edoardo Sanguineti included him in his Italian Poetry of the Twentieth Century, while Glauco Viazzi featured him in The Poets of Futurism 1909–1944. He spent the final years of his life in Sanremo, continuing to work and experiment until his death in 1964.
In 2015, the exhibition Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini. Farfa from the World to Sanremo was inaugurated, featuring more than one hundred works displayed in the halls of the renowned casino of the Ligurian city.
MUSEUMS
Trento e Rovereto, MART – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea
Savona, Museo della Ceramica
Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM)
Houston (USA), Museum of Contemporary Art