I live in Catanzaro, a small Calabrian city in the south of Italy. It’s a beautiful place to live in.
If geographically it’s a great place, it can’t be said the same from a cultural point of view. We are in the land that the ancient Greeks called “Magna Graecia”, rich of culture and history, but with a bad political administration of a sterile and incompetent ruling class that never wanted to take advantage of the land’s huge potentialities for public good.
To say the truth, in the last years, something has moved, because some forward-looking entrepreneurs have comprehended the importance of the valorization of what history has given to us.
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I never wished to be a painter of the fashion of the moment.
I strain myself to linger on the pictorial quality of contents.
My art is always dedicated to who can recognize it. To who can see a message. To who sees my message. Art is bought for passion, for pleasure, to invest. I like to think that who buys my works, also buys a temporal door and who wants to enter it, will be conducted into my world, in my way of doing art.
It is not the man that chooses to be an artist, but it’s the art that possesses the person.
When I find myself on the road, my brain automatically traces the prospective of what I see. I mix the colors on a virtual tablet, searching for the right shades. As soon as the painting takes form in me, the landscape already has already changed and I start yet again.
This is what makes a man an artist.
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The new series of works on concrete is the one that is giving me more personal and professional satisfaction. How was it born? It was the result of an important investigation into my work, the research of that “quid” that i felt was missing. Looking at my work of the past ten years I understood that there was both semantics and semiotics in my visual speech, but the right support to valorize the message was not there.
The reinforced cement, the concrete, was created by two thousand years ago by the Romans. It has a millenary story, made of amphitheatres, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now it’s a synonym for modernity. Everywhere you go , you find a concrete wall, there’s the modern man in there.
From Sidney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, the reinforced cement is present and consequently the support where the “writers” can express themselves is as well present.
The successive passage was obvious to me. If man brought art on the streets in order to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring it to the urban galleries and museums? It was the winning step to the continuous evolutionary process of my work in that “quid” that i was talking about before and that is what is making me expose in prestigious places and is making me to be an artist of demand from important collectors.
The artistic process in which i create my works is classical.
After I have traced the very detailed drawing, I put the oil colors and the glazes till I reach the final result.
When the painting has completely dried off, I brush it with a particular stuff that not only manages to unite every color and shade, but it also gives to the art work the shininess and lucidity that the poster ,that each and every one of us had hanging on the wall, has.
For my Concrete Sculptures I use my personal clothing. Throughout the artistic process, in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I transform them into artworks to hang. My memory, my DNA, my memories remain concretized inside, transforming the person that looks at the artworks a type of post-modern archaeologist that studies my work as they were urban artefacts.
I love graffiti, I really like to study their communicative methods.
I know absolutely nothing on how to do a graffiti, I tried, but with awful results.
But with that experience I understood that the usage of the words is fundamental to make art. The words arrive and strike the brain directly , like a cold and devastating bullet. So, feeling that effect, inside me a tile of my mosaic was missing, I created a new series of works.
In my series “Words” I use reinforced cement in all of its essence and elegance.
I build letters in reinforced cement with which I compose the words that I transmit my message with. They reach the viewer like a scratch, but they are in line with my work and my research. The abstract concept of the word presents, materializing itselft within the concrete.
Forthcoming solo exhibitions :
From 29 Aug- 31 Oct 2019 at Manni Art Gallery, Venice, Italy
From 19 Nov- 31 Dec 2019 at Biblioteek Hilversum, Hiversum ,Netherlands
From Apr-2020 to Apr 2021 at Zylinderhaus Museum, Bernkastel-Kues , Germany
