By: John Glover (MBA)
Born in 1979, Cesare Catania is an Italian artist now fully established internationally. Considered by many to be a pioneer of digital art, Catania was born as a traditional artist and is counted among the masters of contemporary art for his polychromatic paintings and his timeless sculptures.
But where does all this artistic genius come from?
The story of Cesare Catania is quite singular. Since he was passionate about painting and drawing as a child, he approached musical art with a strict piano education. Catania immediately showed an innate predisposition for science and mathematics. He accustoms his mind to solving problems of logic, arithmetic, and geometry. He learns to observe reality with a single eye: that of someone who first synthesizes, then abstracts, and finally creates. Like Leonardo da Vinci, who combined science and art to explore the mysteries of nature, Catania also unites two seemingly distant worlds to create something extraordinary. “Scientia potentia est” (Knowledge is power) seems to be a guiding principle for his work.
Catania then decided to study civil engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan, which, according to him, “was perhaps the only faculty that I could have done without much effort. I didn’t like memorizing; I preferred to read only once, understand, assimilate, and therefore remember. The humanistic faculties would have forced me to repeat mnemonically to create synapses and memorize. Fixing the memory of something that logically has its own correlation is definitely quicker and easier than doing it on something to repeat and memorize.“
And so far, perhaps nothing special. We are, therefore, talking about an engineer who is a lover of logic, mathematics, and problem-solving in all the fields in which this can be applied. Of course, everything was quite normal, except this engineer was actually an artist who abstracted the reality around him, synthesized it into simple polygons, and finally transformed it into works of art. His unique vision still allows him to see the world through a geometric lens, transforming the chaos of everyday life into orderly and harmonious works of art.
Except this engineer was simply looking for a way to fully study the world around him and represent it absolutely through the instrument that sentimentally belonged to him most: contemporary art. Except this artist continues to call his works of art “works of genius” today. Except that this artist handles brush, colors, matter, and all the tools of contemporary art as if they were everyday utensils, almost as if they were a knife and fork. When a new material is presented to him, such as glass, in the artist residency in Venice in July 2023, rather than intimidating him, it exalts him and pushes him towards creativity.
Except when you talk to this engineer, you feel like you’re talking to a philosopher. Then you understand that he’s an artist who, however, likes to define himself as “a simple worker of emotions.” Like Leonardo da Vinci, who studied the human body with scientific precision to represent it artistically, Catania combines his engineering knowledge with his artistic sensitivity. Catania’s works are a product of his rational mind and a profound reflection of his feelings and life experiences.
Self-taught in artistic matters, the Italian painter and sculptor perhaps did not immediately have clear ideas of what awaited him in adulthood. What is certain is that he had to combine his passion for geometry with his sensitivity. “A sensitivity I wasn’t willing to give in to. Rationality is a matter for children when combined with sentimental aridity. Truly mature people are those who know how to get emotional and are not ashamed to show it.” The Italian artist explains this to us: a unique embodiment of a combination of talent and training. This combination has allowed Catania to develop a distinctive style that differentiates him from his contemporaries.
Today, we find him among the most successful artists of our era, capable of representing the contemporary world with recognizable, personal, democratic, shared, and universal art. An art that always derives from inspiration. “I don’t like creating works of art that don’t have a connection to my feelings,” the Italian artist explains. “Otherwise, I would be creating design works. Every time I approach the canvas or the shapeless material to be shaped, I always feel the same lump in my throat, the same shyness of someone who knows what they feel but doesn’t know how to represent it. This is how an artist should feel before every creation.” This feeling of shyness and respect for the creative process is a constant in Catania’s career and reflects his deep humility and dedication to his art.
He is, therefore, an artist who developed a passion starting from his feelings and from a profession: that of an engineer. He was an engineer who made his studies the virtue of his informal art first, cubist and geometric later. An artist who started from the world around him to represent shapes and images. Knowing his passions for photography and cinematography well, he was an engineer who decided to let himself be carried away by what attracted him most: feelings.
His works are a journey through time and space, a continuous dialogue between past, present and future, always guided by a profound sense of humanity. For example, his latest work was presented at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale. The work is titled “The Embrace Phy Version” and is a physical work of art which, thanks to augmented reality and artificial intelligence, becomes a phygital sculpture. In practice, the artist Cesare Catania created a masterpiece of contemporary sculpture in 2023, then passed the sculpture to the engineer Cesare Catania, who developed digital sculpture software and a digital version of the work itself to ferry it from the real world to reality and finally, at the beginning of 2024, the artist Cesare Catania once again gave an artistic touch to the whole thing and presented it at the Venice Biennale. It is a unique work in every sense that develops engagement on the part of the public, a work that is not only liked but also different. A work that excites because of how it is made and what it does. A work of art that immediately becomes a work of genius if you think only about half of what was done to make it as we see it today. A work that, given the way it was conceived, is certainly the contemporary art sculpture of the future.
Published by: Khy Talara
