Silvio Loffredo was born in Paris in 1920 following his family’s move from Torre del Greco. His first teacher was his father Michele, a well-known portraitist who taught him how to draw and gave him the opportunity to meet and spend time with Picasso and Legér. In order to continue his studies at the Grand Chaumiére School of the Nude, he worked as a tailor with his brother Victor. Shortly before the war, Loffredo married the young portraitist Suzanna Newell. During the Second World War, he fought in the Italian troops supporting the 8th Army. At the end of the war, he moved to Rome where he attended the academy under the direction of Amerigo Bartoli. Loffredo then went to Siena and finally transferred permanently to Florence where he began his apprenticeship under Ottone Rosai, rediscovering French painting and the great pictorial innovations introduced by Picasso Between 1950 and 1960, he eagerly dedicated himself to being a director and worked together with his brother Victor on various projects for the Cooperativa del Nuovo Cinema Indipendente (New Independent Cinema Cooperative) in Rome. His constant desire for knowledge led him to travel the world, expanding his research and experimentation. In 1953, Loffredo was in Santiago, Chile, which was an important stop to see in person the splendid South American murals. Between 1959 and 1960, he took one of his personal shows to Philadelphia, where he was introduced to the American avant-gardes. In 1962, he took part in the XXXI Venice Biennale. After numerous commissions in Europe, he was invited to New York in 1970 for some public commissions. From 1973 to 1990, he held the painting chair at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. It is important to remember the 1993 exhibition inaugurated in Pisa at the National Museum of San Matteo with fifty engravings dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre. In 2004, he was awarded the Città di Firenze Beato Angelico prize in Palazzo Vecchio. His self-portrait is on display in the Vasari Corridor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
(PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER) There are more than two hundred and fifty engravings by Silvio Loffredo that put together a bizarre and fascinating gallery of images. Men and women encountered in the streets, circus characters, real and fantastic animals, palaces, Florentine streets and buildings, and self-portraits highlight his extravagance and originality drawing attention to the shrewd and unrepentant look of a young man in his nineties. Loffredo was a wanderer and a dreamer whose works offered truth and unadulterated, genuine poetry. The artist fiddled with acids and plates, etchings and grounds, achieving subtle painstaking descriptions that alternate with indecipherable tangles that reinterpret reality through his personal vision of the world. In the etching with his Ritratto del padre, very often made as a companion to that of his mother, there is an uncontrollable curiosity vis-à-vis the signs that time left on the faces of his beloved parents, in which the artist transferred a constant source of emotional authenticity. Loffredo did not linger on exposing his subjects to cultural disagreements in communication. Instead he moved towards a certainty in the essential inner serenity of his state of being, following his own forces and avoiding any regret for lost emotions that only memory, and therefore his works, have managed to keep alive.