Borgo Museo | Affreschi 1975
Biography
Silvio Loffedro was born in Paris in 1920; from an early age he showed great admiration for his father, a well-known portraitist with a naturalistic vein, who projected him into the world of art. Loffredo attended the nude school at the Grand Chaumière and at the end of the war he graduated from the art institute of Siena. Shortly before the war Silvio Loffedro marries Suzanna Neweler (well-known portrait painter). Later he moved to Rome and a few years later to Florence. One of Silvio Loffedro’s passions is cinema, and between 1950 and 1960 he devoted himself full time to the activity of director working at the Nuovo Cinema in Rome; however, his great passion is graphics. From 1973 to 1990 he held the chair of painting in Florence at the Academy of Fine Arts and on 12 June 2003 he received the silver medal for career dedicated to art from the president of the Tuscan regional council. Silvio, as told by Tommaso Paloscia, is a man with a jovial and sympathetically comradely character who never breaks down in front of an obstacle. He died in Puglia at the age of 93 after having lived a life full of experiences that formed him both as a painter and as a man.
Philosophy
A very valid painter, he inherits the creativity gene from his father Michele and it is he who helps him to understand color, shape and to control the light in the subtle modelling. Silvio tackles painting with a soul educated in the Neapolitan light by his father and that of the Impressionists who exalt the values of the art they themselves revolutionised. Master Bartoli was important to him, as he was the first truly authoritative school character who was interested in his talent, and for this reason he remains in Silvio’s memory more than other painters such as Picasso and Léger whom he knows in the Parisian era. He meets Celestino Celestini in Florence, an engraver of great value who makes him fall in love with this discipline; Silvio is in fact defined by Ottone Rosai as one of the most imaginative and refined painter and engraver of his generation. He follows lessons in Salzburg with the master Oscar Kokoschka, who tries to make his students, including his wife, understand how to get rid of the acronyms, or how to get away from models already used to create something new. His painting, with a figurative approach, is clearly of a post-expressionist matrix, in which the recurring themes are cats and baptisteries.
Artwork in Castagno
Silvio Loffredo’s work is the fresco representing the month of January (Gennaio), created in 1975 in honour of the edition of the National Chestnut Painting Award announced by Tommaso Paloscia, in which 12 artists were called to create a cycle of frescoes depicting the twelve months of the year. Silvio, decides to represent in the space dedicated to him what he loves most: the Baptistery of Florence and, in the lower right corner, a cat. Silvio, has a real passion for the Baptistery of San Giovanni, because for a certain period of his life he has a studio in the historic center of Florence, whose window overlooks this imposing and magnificent structure; he therefore has the opportunity to admire it every day and this greatly influences his artistic production, since it is a very recurring theme. From the type of brushstroke with which the colours (mainly light) are used by Silvio for this fresco, it is possible to identify the influence of the Austrian painter Oscar Kokoschka.