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Bolivar Patalano

He was born in Forio on 2/14/1901 from a family of poets and patriots, the tenth of fourteen children. At the age of twenty, he emigrated to the United States where he does different trades to live honestly. Following a serious accident he is interned in a psychiatric hospital where learns to model statues with crumbs of bread, soap and potatoes. Meanwhile, the deceased father and brothers, believing him dead, have confiscated also his share of the inheritance. Other properties end up in the Church. He returned to Forio in 1951 in the period in which artists and intellectuals flock there from all parts of the world that crown the great Anglo-American poet WH Auden, who had elected to his home after the end of World War II. To experience he began painting in the abstract, he exhibited his paintings in the entrance hall of the palace in Corso Umberto I, but he does not sell because it was too forward of his countrymen. He changes kind, to the figurative one, he dedicates himself to portraits, covers all of those who want to put care to give a psychological dimension to the images. He works tirelessly and so now we have a never-ending gallery of portraits of great and small, but all interesting, which then crowded Forio. His art can be defined as material in ways that critics have called "action painting". Recently he has resumed happily primitive abstract ways. He died in 1981.