The awe-inspiring work of Italian artist Tindàr is more than meets the eye. Though visually captivating and created with great skill, his art is also highly conceptual. With deliberate motifs, unique installations, and meaningful materials, Tindàr comments on a range of poignant topics, including the migrant crisis, explorations of identity, and, in his Roots series, a plea for peaceful coexistence.
The natural world is a key theme in Tindàr’s oeuvre. In Roots, the artist covers pages from old books—including an encyclopedia and a manuscript—with the wildly intertwining roots of trees. Rendered in pencil and depicted in exquisite detail, the growing roots spill over the pages, concealing text and turning the individual leafs of paper into a single canvas. While all of the pieces are striking, Awareness of Religions, an exploration of faith, is perhaps the most powerful.
The Awareness of Religions triptych features excerpts from three sacred texts—the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah. The torn-out pages are seamlessly connected by the untamed roots of a single tree, uniting the three monolithic religions and representing the artist’s deepest hope: “Although the story that we write every day seems to prove otherwise,” he writes about Roots, “I like to think that something will change, that it is changing right now or has already changed, even just in the dreams of those who want to believe in these things.” Though Awareness of Religions was created in 2012, its message of peace and plea for unity are deeply resonant today.
Surprisingly, Tindàr has not always been interested in art. Though drawing is now his preferred practice, he claims he did not enjoy it as a child. Similarly, though he would eventually study Art History, he first pursued a degree in Business Management. After graduating in 2008, however, he began to dabble in the arts and, today, he finds artistic inspiration everywhere: “Sometimes it’s a leopard, other times a beggar and other times Dante’s lost profile,” he poetically describes in Aletheia. “Often it’s formless poetry that I enjoy in silence – giving it back to where it came from – nature.”
Tindàr: Website | Facebook
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All images via Studio Pivot.