Marzio Tamer

Egg tempera painter and watercolourist

Tempera tutorial video, please click here

Marzio Tamer was born in 1964 in Schio, a town in the region of Veneto, northern Italy. He studies in Milan where he lives and works. An autodidact painter and profound connoisseur of nature and of its rhythms, for his debut in 1993 he is fostered by the Salamons. They encourage him to leave acrylic painting aside in order to begin experimenting with egg tempera.

In a few years, this technique turns out to be the most congenial to the artist's intents. The meticulous attention underlying paintings in egg tempera absorbs Tamer in very long lead times, and once more he is supported in testing different techniques. In 2002 Tamer begins a fruitful journey in fully understanding acquarelle, through the dry brush style.

Few years later he masters this new technique like few other artists, being able to benefit from the typical freshness of this language. At the same time he doesn't neglect his usual formal perfectionism and doesn't betray his impeccable point of view, recognizable despite the variety of subjects depicted.
His paintings are appreciated by both the public and the critics, unquestioningly. Journalists of this field, who value his intellectual autonomy from trendy genres, write widely about him.

In 1999 he exhibits in London, at the Mathiessen Gallery, in Duke Street, where he is spotted by Timothy Standring, curator of the Paul Getty Museum and still chief curator of the Denver Art Museum. Standring's enthusiasm for Tamer's pieces fostered the author's visibility in the USA.
In 2005 Salamon&Co. organizes a retrospective dedicated to the ten year-long activity performed together and on that occasion issues an exhaustive catalogue, published by De Luca Editori d'Arte.

Tamer’s point on view:
In spite of the technical virtuosity, his painting is permeated of profound poetry, unicity and modernity. His main source of inspiration is nature: landscapes and portraits of animals. Although he invents and makes his landscapes in an atelier, the verisimilitude with reality is surprising. Instead, the portraiture of animals is a different process: before he deeply observes immersed in nature, later, once he acquired the exact physiognomy of the animals, Tamers places them in a contest with no elements, empty: he calls them “suspended backgrounds”. Yet although unreal, they give a sense of space. And it is this setting that makes his production unprecedented.
The seeming simplicity characterizing all his paintings derives from a profound attention to the composition that allows him to interpret the most complex atmospheres depicting them with an exemplary neatness.
Another point of strength of Tamer's paintings is the so refined palette choice, often limited to few colours per painting - or so it appears - of rare formal elegance.
Marzio's iconographic selection shows a recognizable and never predictable point of view, subjects or atmospheres are rarely replicated. The profound aesthetic research and the artist's strong personality permeate his painting: poetic, unique, unprecedented, intelligent and sensibile.