Gaetano Tranchino (born 1938, Syracuse, Sicily) is a prominent Sicilian painter, known for his evocative and color-rich depictions of his native Sicily. A leading figure among his generation of Sicilian artists, Tranchino has been active in the art world since 1964, exhibiting his work extensively in Italy and internationally.^[1]

Sicilian painter Gaetano Tranchino was born in Syracuse (Siracusa), Sicily in 1938, and is among the best-known of his generation of Sicilian artists. A close friend of the writer Leonardo Sciascia and the photographer Ferdinando Scianna, Tranchino has, since 1964, exhibited throughout Italy and beyond.

Tranchino's work is typified by distinctive, colour-infused images that present a dazzling, dreamlike and somewhat introspective vision of his native Sicily, fusing myth and personal memories of, especially, the postwar period of his childhood and youth. Motifs of departing ships (often under a full plume of steam), solitary readers and walkers, the rich and almost idyllic landscapes of rural or small-city life, appear again and again in his work, connecting and refining images made sometimes decades apart.

According to Sciascia: “Tranchino, à la Stendhal, à la Savinio, does not work… he enjoys himself, that is to say, he paints with delight, with pleasure, as on a prolonged vacation – so very prolonged –, continuous and intense enough to absorb his whole life.”

According to Irish poet Pat Boran, a number of whose books feature cover images by Tranchino, and whose anthology The Word Ark: A Pocket Book of Animal Poems was illustrated by Tranchino: “Though he might laugh at the notion, there is in his work if not quite a religious impulse then certainly a ‘sacredizing’ one, an impulse which makes something special and numinous of an old gateway, of the palm tree leaning over it, of a half-eroded Doric column on a hillside or the tree-lined pier which reaches out to protect an approaching ship.”

Writing in The Irish Times (5 May 2010) of Tranchino’s 2010 solo exhibition at the Rua/Red Gallery in Tallaght, Dublin, Ireland, art critic Aidan Dunne observed: “He uses intense yellows, pinks, reds, greens and blues in richly textured, jewel-like masses, often accentuated by strong tonal contrasts. If he wasn’t such a good painter it could all go horribly wrong, but he is actually a fine, sensitive painter, and the paintings are not only attractive but capable of withstanding sustained attention: they’d be good to live with, in other words. Tranchino’s place of memory is tinged with the sadness of loss, but as formulated, it’s an almost pleasurable sadness.”

• Artist website: Gaetano Tranchino
• Artist page on artnet.com
• The Word Ark: A Pocket Book of Animal Poems on Dedalus Press website