Gaetano D'Aquino - MINA

Patinated terracotta sculpture by Gaetano D' Aquino with authenticated photo

Gaetano D`Aquino was born in Catania on August 30, 1969, where he currently resides and works. After earning a diploma in artistic maturity at the high school, he joined several contemporary artistic movements.

D`Aquino has embarked on his personal journey in the field of painting, giving life to 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 catalogs.


EXHIBITIONS, SOLO AND GROUP:

1998 May Artistic Catanese, Catania (group)

2000 Gallery, Il Massimo, Catania (solo)

2000 Incontro con La Pittura, Mascalucia (group)

2001 Gallery, Giotto, Catania (solo)

2004 Prima rassegna d`arte contemporanea, BOHEMIEN, palazzo comunale, Acireale

2004 Evento d`Arte KATACLOÒ, Teatro Metropolitan, Catania (Group)

2004 Gallery, Il Massimo, Catania (solo)

2005 Seconda Estemporanea di Pittura a cura di Vittorio Sgarbi, Nineo

2005 Premio Letterario e Artistico ARETUSA Terzo Millennio, sez. pittura, primo classificato, Centro Siculo per la Diffusione della Cultura, Sede Regionale Siracusa

2006 I Colori Dentro e Fuori il Rettangolo Verde, Rassegna di Arti visive Contemporanea, Hotel Luna, (Oleggio Castello, Milano) a cura di Donat Conenna

2007 Arte Fiera, Le Ciminiere, Catania

2007 Galleria, Arte Nuvò, Catania (solo)

2007 Galleria, Art Gallery Ortigia, Siracusa (solo)

2008 Tremestieri, Arte XIV edizione, Tremestieri Etneo

2009 Galleria, Il Massimo, Catania (solo)

2012 Galleria, Civico 69, Firenze (solo)

2015 Giornata dell`Arte e della Creatività EMPIRE, Catania (group)

2015 Europa Eventi Arte, centro commerciale Porte di Catania (Group)

2016 Galleria, Collezioni Contemporanee, Enna Bassa (group)


GAETANO D`AQUINO E LA VERITÀ DELL`ESSERE DI DONAT CONENNA

Per raggiungere la verità dell`essere (nel personaggio, nell`oggetto, e in ogni altro concetto visivo) occorre ci sia la sofferenza del procedere cognitivo. Tradotto in parole povere: bisogna saper dipingere.

In a second moment we can consider all the motions of the “es” (express, externalize, listen, expose) that lead man to become an expresser of realities, external and internal to him.

To frame in the right light the case of D`Aquino, Gaetano D`Aquino from Catania, we need to 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 reaching being. For artists, this kind of “Buonarroti syndrome” (“Why don’t you speak?”) is felt – naturally more or less – in relation to their narrative possibilities.

The reasons why Gaetano D`Aquino approaches the blank canvas and “incigns” it, beginning to sketch the graphic trace, which then lights up with colors, thus giving grace to the truth of the image obtained, lie precisely in that operation of mimesis, which we poor mortals do not know how to do: namely to bring to the surface - on an already limited and limiting canvas - 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 that voca (from vocare, vocation) rarifies more and more artists of a “total” reality, like D`Aquino.

Operator of the image, especially anatomical, which can well be defined as hyperrealist, when in his civil, lay, profane “icons” he saves the subject in the foreground, on the canvas, from the perils 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 to see the other.

D`Aquino works with infinite refinement, playing with a capillary marking of the epidermal details of the work, which then wraps in a sequence of color glazes, until obtaining the uniqueness of the subject, exactly - “as if” - the painter from Catania wanted to pluck from the world those (now rare) fractions of plastic integrity and make them live again forever on his canvases. But it is not as easy as it sounds, of course.

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

It would be easy, as always happens with verist, realist, hyperrealist painters, even in this case, to invoke the now antiquated rights to interpretation that man, undoubtedly, must claim, and which – historically proven – has instead led the concept of art toward the non-distinction between meaning and signifier of abstraction, toward the conceptual casualness of performances, toward the populist gestural of the informal art, pardon informal, toward the automatisms of the photographic click, toward the non-spectral truth, indeed virtual, of computer art, toward the illusionisms of kinetic art. In one word, toward the chaos of definitions.

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

Donat Conenna

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF MY ARTISTIC VISION

Since my childhood, I had the privilege of immersing myself in art, admiring the wonderful portraits of Emanuele Di Giovanni, the famous Catanese painter. This was the initial enchantment that triggered my fascinating journey into the world of painting; marked by various artistic successes, solo exhibitions, and my works present around the world. I began with portraiture and then tackled different themes such as landscape, still life and the nude.

Personally I try to express and highlight what others do not see and make it visible through my eyes. I define painting as a silent poetry, as Leonardo da Vinci said.

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

I have realized to date that studying water is among the most difficult things to represent, and after observing Turner’s paintings I understood that water and light are almost impossible to essentialize.

Gaetano D`Aquino