In the world of Street Art there are more and more women active abroad, but also in Italy: the Roman artist Tina Loiodice, born in 1954, is an example, who after about forty years of painting in the atelier approached the mural art. Student of masters such as Saro Mirabella, Franco Cannilla and Aldo Natili, Loiodice attended the art high school in via Ripetta and later she studied Architecture at La Sapienza University.

Her peculiarity is that of being able to infuse great expressiveness and intensity to the subjects represented by her, managing almost to create a “dialogue” between work and spectator. Proof of this is the portrait entitled Thinking Child, made in 2015 at the former Manicomio Park in Santa Maria della Pietà in the Monte Mario neighborhood, in Rome: the hair is broken down, the big eyes communicate vivacity and amazement at the same time, while the hand is resting on the chin in a questioning manner. The black and white and the vaguely 60s clothing make you think of a vintage photograph, in which a little girl is shown who has spent her childhood in what was once a madhouse. The work was carried out as part of the Kaleidoscope project, conceived in 2015 by the writer Maurizio Mequio, which led to the creation of a series of murals inspired by the theme of mental illness. Precisely this portrait has made known Tina Loiodice, who then took part in various urban redevelopment projects.

The artist is a portraitist who prefers to portray women, children and protagonists of Italian cinema. At the Giustiniana station, in Rome, she painted the faces of four icons of the 60s and 70s that emerge in a pop setting, characterized by polka dots and bright colors: Virna Lisi, Anna Magnani, Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale, the latter portrayed in full length on the set of The Girl with a Suitcase. The intervention was carried out in 2016 for the project Arte in stazione e città a colori.

For the Castel Gandolfo Street Art Festival, held between November and December 2016, Loiodice has created two murals for the redevelopment of the tourist coach parking in Piazza S. Pertini. The event was born on the initiative of the Municipality of Castel Gandolfo which has joined the Arte e Città a Colori project. Both works are inspired by the theme of the beauty of women and represent the transition from childhood to adulthood: in the first mural is in fact depicted frontally a little girl with a vaguely intimidated expression, as if she felt observed by passers-by, while in the second the same little girl has become a self-confident woman and of her own femininity, and is portrayed of three quarters.

In January 2017, the artist worked in the San Giovanni metro station, where she created Lo sguardo, which reproduces the eyes of a tiger in order to tell the first relationship of communication between individuals. In the same station she then painted Matrix Divina, which twice depicts, in a specular manner, the foreground of a woman with hair in the wind, united in a play of colors and lines that represent the molecules of life and matter. The title of the work derives from the homonymous book by Gregg Braden, an American scholar who has worked for years in the field of spirituality, trying to combine science and spirit, past and present.

Since 2018 Tina Loiodice is engaged in the realization of a series of murals inspired by the theme of the fairy tale in Sant’Angelo di Roccalvecce, a small village near Viterbo. Here, in fact, an urban redevelopment project was promoted with the title Sant’Angelo the land of fairy tales, intended to counter depopulation and to revive the local economy, and which led to the creation of wall paintings on the facades of some houses. Tina Loiodice has painted the protagonists of famous fairy tales such as Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince portraying the faces of the children of the village, thus involving citizens in what has become an artistic intervention that has attracted the attention of tourists and the media and that is giving new life to a country that until recently was unknown and semi-abandoned.

Adriana Camilla Caputo