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Where a Devoted Star Loses its Way,
Little Star, In the Castle of Clouds,
Pond Birds Take Flight, The Dark Significance
of Flights, In a Foreign Country, Make
Room for Our Prayers.
Put like this, one after the other,
read all in one breath, the beautiful
titles of some of Silvio Cattani's recent
paintings, not only do they find a unifying
meaning, assuming the appearance of
verses of hermetic poetry, they also
express the profound sense of the work
of this local artist. He studied at
the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and
in Urbino, two emblematic cities of
art, full of historical artistic culture
and architecturally "formative"
in their own right.
Cattani's painting style is refined
and at first glance could be labelled
as abstract since the coloured patterns
always tend towards neo-expressionism,
on the model adopted from famous German
contemporary artists like Baselitz,
with clear subliminal references to
the figurative, to the world of real
things. These things are evoked from
titles and writings in German often
inserted into the paintings and at closer
range the feelings that arise from these
"things" become prevalent,
so every "object" is a type
of Montale style "objective correlative":
the significant through which Cattani
expresses a poetic significance correlated
to his spiritualistic Weltanschauung.
Recently, some have made reference to
Surrealism when writing about these
artworks, even if there isn't much surrealism
nor many post-surrealist automatisms
in them. In fact, when Cattani paints
he does so with lucid awareness and
highly calibrated technique, far from
any form of impetuous and unconscious
Action Painting.
Despite having studied at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Venice there is no emulation
of the "prophet" Emilio Vedova
and nor is there a trace of certain
violent Viennese Actionism despite having
worked in a Central European environment.
If anything, the influence of Klee is
undeniable - deep and nearly subliminal,
and so is all the philosophy of Der
Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) - the
effect of his reading of Uber das Geistige
in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual
in Art) by Kandinskij.
This does not mean that Cattani is an
imitator. Quite the opposite. His work
is completely autonomous, as seen in
the use of stratified spreading of vivid
colours - ultramarine, carmine, green
and yellow - inserted carefully into
structural outlines, the mark of the
graphite is clearly seen on the canvas
becoming both an integrating and structural
part of the composition.
The ample size of the picture is also
"significant" at an expressive
level, as well as the frame in certain
cases. In a series of paintings from
2007, the frame is the shape of a mandorla,
a direct reference to the medieval paintings
it appears in, for example, the image
of Christ Pantocrator in mandorla. Yet,
it is also a form which becomes an erotic
provocative citation of the female sex
and of the Origine du monde (Origin
of the World) by Gustav Courbet.
One thing must be made clear, Cattani
is averse to any sensationalism or desire
to provoke, his artistic research is
based on the dialectic between painting
and interiority, the unambiguous connection
between technique and thought, in a
practice kept constant and rigorous
in the eighties, without useless experimentations.
Cattani attempted the only concessions
to experimentation applying his pictorial
patterns to mosaic, and his painting
style proved to be very well suited
thanks to the disconnected background
(despite not being
homogenous) and the apparent approximation
of the pictorial ductus, which is averse
to certain flat or enamelled backgrounds
in vogue nowadays. He favours an intensity
of action which has the cutting harshness
of the vitreous glass mosaic tiles of
the Venetian mosaic, almost as if it
were a return to the origins of his
studies in Venice.
from
Guido Curto
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