Gaetano D' Aquino (1969) - Il Pensatore

Oil on canvas 40x45 by Gaetano D' Aquino with authenticated photo

Gaetano D`Aquino was born in Catania on August 30, 1969, where he currently lives and works. After obtaining the high school diploma in the artistic track, he joined several contemporary art movements.

D`Aquino has embarked on his personal journey in painting, bringing to life his creative visions through a variety of themes and techniques. This path has made him a distinguished representative of contemporary art.

D`Aquino's works have been acquired by numerous important public and private collections, and have found space in many specialized magazines and art catalogues.


PERSONAL AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS:

1998 May Artistic Catanese, Catania (group)

2000 Gallery, Il Massimo, Catania (solo)

2000 Encounter with Painting, Mascalucia (group)

2001 Gallery, Giotto, Catania (solo)

2004 First Exhibition of Contemporary Art, BOHEMIEN, municipal palace, Acireale

2004 Art Event KATACLOÒ, Teatro Metropolitan, Catania (Group)

2004 Gallery, Il Massimo, Catania (solo)

2005 Second Estemporanea di Pittura curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, Nineo

2005 Literary and Artistic Prize ARETUSA Terzo Millennio, painting section, first prize, Centro Siculo per la Diffusione della Cultura, Siracusa Regional Office

2006 The Colors Within and Outside the Green Rectangle, Visual Arts contemporary review, Hotel Luna, (Oleggio Castello, Milan) curated by Donat Conenna

2007 Arte Fiera, Le Ciminiere, Catania

2007 Gallery, Arte Nuvo, Catania (solo)

2007 Gallery, Art Gallery Ortigia, Siracusa (solo)

2008 Tremestieri, Arte XIV edition, Tremestieri Etneo

2009 Gallery, Il Massimo, Catania (solo)

2012 Gallery, Civico 69, Florence (solo)

2015 Day of Art and Creativity EMPIRE, Catania (group)

2015 Europa Eventi Arte, Porte di Catania shopping center (Group)

2016 Gallery, Contemporaries Collections, Enna Bassa (group)


GAETANO D`AQUINO AND THE TRUTH OF BEING OF DONAT CONENNA

To reach the truth of being (in the character, in the object, and in every other visual concept) there must be the suffering of cognitive progress. Put simply: one must know how to paint.

In a second step we can consider all the motions of the “es” (express, exteriorize, listen, expose) that lead man to become the expr essor of realities, external and internal to him.

To frame the case of D`Aquino, Gaetano D`Aquino from Catania, one must paraphrase Descartes. I paint, therefore I am. An axiom that leads the myth of the image, of which we all are unaware carriers by cultural heritage, to indicate the possibility of thought to reach being. For artists, this sort of “Buonarroti syndrome” (“Why don’t you speak?”) is felt — naturally more or less — in relation to their own narrative possibilities.

The reasons why Gaetano D`Aquino approaches the white canvas and “scorches” it, starting to mark the graphic sketch, which then lights up with colors, thus granting the grace of truth to the image obtained, lie precisely in that act of mimesis, which we poor mortals do not know how to do: i.e., to bring to the surface — on the canvas, though limited and limiting — the external and internal horizons of the landscape, object, character, concept.

An operation that, in various stylistic forms, has traversed the centuries and the history of art but which calls (from vocare, vocation) with increasing rarity artists of total reality, like D`Aquino.

Operator of the image, especially anatomical, which can well be defined hyperrealistic, when in his civic, secular, profane “icons” he saves the subject brought to the foreground on the canvas from the snares of impression, i.e., the temptation to summarize, to essentialize. The velvety “Body of a Woman” is the narration of a woman’s body: no one would think of seeing the other.

D`Aquino works with infinite delicacy, playing with a capillary marking of the epidermal details of the work, which he then envelops in a sequence of color glazes, until obtaining the uniqueness of the subject, precisely — “as if” the painter from Catania wanted to glean from the world those (now rare) fractions of plastic integrity and make them live forever on his canvases. But it’s not as easy as saying it, of course.

And here is his slow, meditated turn toward reality: even in the stillness of a single frame, the being, the “living” of a landscape, an object, a character, a concept, are traversed by a light that we by definition call “photographic,” but which in Gaetano D`Aquino is nothing but the voluptuous desire to reach the mime of absolute natural, to mark with rigor the surrounding, to give exact somatic fidelity to the anatomies.

It would be easy, as always happens with realist, real, hyperrealist painters, even in this case, to invoke the now antique rights to interpretation that man, undoubtedly, must claim, and which — it is historically established — instead led the concept of art toward the indistinction between meaning and signifier of abstraction, toward conceptual randomness of performances, toward the populist gestural of formless art, pardon informal, toward the automated effects of the photographic click, toward non-simultaneous truth, indeed virtual truth, of computer art, toward the illusionisms of kinetic art. In a word, toward the chaos of definitions.

Ten thousand years from Altamira, we still cannot say what art is. Exactly the opposite of the direction in which this Sicilian operator has directed us, with his reaffirmed, calm, palm-like, tactile, anthropic narrative completeness.

Donat Conenna


BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF MY ARTISTIC VISION

Since my childhood, I have had the privilege of immersing myself in art, admiring the wonderful portraits of Emanuele Di Giovanni, the famous painter from Catania. This was the initial enchantment that triggered my fascinating journey into the world of painting; a path filled with various artistic successes, solo exhibitions, and my works present all over the world. I started with portraiture and then tackled different themes such as landscape, still life, and the nude.

I personally strive to express and highlight what others do not see and to show it through my own eyes. I define painting as a mute poetry, as Leonardo Da Vinci said.

Today, after a long painting career and after facing many subjects, I have focused on the intense study of Sicily, my homeland. Specifically on water, in all its shades, reflections, colors, luster, transparency, and as a life element characteristic of my island; as the Etna volcano, also part of my studies, with its lava flows.

To date I have realized that the study of water is among the most difficult things to represent, and observing Turner’s paintings, I have understood that water and light are almost impossible to objectify.

Gaetano D`Aquino