In Praise of his works

Doctor Prof. Giorgio Tomaso Bagni

“Pío X” College, Treviso

Many different choices can lead an artist to approach, read, interpret and finally to re enact reality. Such choices determine clearly the style of each particular artist. They fix a cultural proposal; inform research, they suggest the approach to or the joining of a certain tendency. The works by Marco Cagnetti are characterized by the always free use of symbols, but carefully meditated at the same time. The Tuscan artist presents a series of pieces in which an onirical, decidedly surreal atmosphere, is outlined and clearly defined by the juxtaposition of signs and symbols. They go from a suggestive and seductive transfiguration of elements traced by the visual patrimony, of what’s been seen, and sometimes from daily life. Marco Cagnetti perceptively knows how to geta sort of “imaginary essence” of represented objects, even from the simplest elements, going beyond real facts. Out of that research, which is personal and original, derive works that are certainly pleasant, and always interesting and suggesting, deeply participated in which the spectator soon recognizes images, mental, intuitive, from the realm of dreams.

November 1992, Treviso.

Fascination and mistery

Prof. Doctor Elisabetta Caporali

With great pleasure I wish to devote this analysis to Tuscan artist Marco Cagnetti, in order to allow him making understandable to the public his art full of fantasy and of dream. It’s certainly from those two worlds full of fascination and mystery that Marco’s compositions get their matter. In marine landscapes, in still natures, in dancing natures, we perceive that lightning language, which leaves almost breathless the attentive watcher, sensitive to the colour poetry. From my view, the artist

those colours for which Nature has gifted him with a harmonic vision. The painter Marco Cagnetti has understood clearly this relationship.   It’s possible to see it in his still natures, true surreal representations that instead of anxiety cause liberation from nature, transformed by man.  It’s like the fantasy that a child can still understand because isolated from schematic mental structures. I’ve followed for some time the itinerary of Marco Cagnetti, and I can conclude that I keep my enthusiasm in his work, always looking for something to develop. They express his love for Nature. Compositions with soft lines that introduce unknown places, however more beloved for the majority, due to the oniric, unconscious vision each of us enacts. They allow to discover the importance of the creativity this man will never stop offering

Pisa, November 1992

Voyage in Space

Prof. Doctor Elisabetta Caporali

The spacial painting by Marco Cagnetti is a compound of languages that depart from an oniric and surreal vision, which is present in his last works on masonite, exhibited in April at the Salletta de Tonfano bar. They are eight paintings with mix technique, of bright colours on diverse tones, from dark red to orange; from soft or deep graduations of green to blue, in a continuity of lines and torn apart figures wandering in space.  The voyage in space, metaphor of a surreal trip in which the man from the past meets again the contemporary one, what has triggered the interest of Marco Cagnetti in these last works of his. His pictorial research  goes back fifteen years, when he was spending his “workshop days” at the studios of important artists  known for their working capacity, such as Pratali, Biagi, Possenti. Marco Cagnetti, by learning from those experiences, has worked departing from figure an image linked to nature and dream, as we can see in his first works in acrylic and oil colour.  The artist, back then, represented the marine environment.  An onirical world that on the face of earth embraces the same language. An environment inhabited by its creatures and symbols, the clock, the tower, a woman.  Marco Cagnetti arrives along the years, from the surreal landscapes to free compositions, in a kandiskian style. He paints his dreamt skies with small boats, guided by the invisible strings of a don Quixote who fights poetically in an unreal world, that imagined by Cagnetti. The artist has continued  his ideal and chromatic search, decomposing matter in abstract combinations, keeping original shape and motion.

His nature of man and artist has taken him to reflect on the meaning of existence and of knowledge, in a Virgilian memory that leads back to the Ulysses myth. Marco Cagnetti makes an artistic presentation of the voyage of man through space, without any hint of pomposity. That’s contemplated through his planets, his stars, his spaceships. His interest in colour, he says, is to find again colour’s spirituality, his universal knowledge.

Marco Cagnetti Innocent Spirit

Ms. Eliana Rocchetti

He’s an artist that transfers into his works his innocent spirit, such as reminded by the magic of naive painting. With a first glance at his work, we can find out how he’s looked on surrealism, especially Dali, Van Gogh, Chagall, Picasso. But none of this takes originality to Marco Cagnetti.  Beyond marginal iconographic sights, expresses a personal identity.  Colours are always lively. Red, yellow, green, in some works are reinforced to underline the struggle between good and evil, reflecting the coming of human life itself. Such struggle sometimes merges in works of an abstract tendency, in which anthropomorphic figures vanishes to be replaced by its spiritual equivalent. Other times that struggle happens in works in which anthropomorphic figure doesn’t disappear, and such choice is not made by chance. Man is a departure point, but in him lives the animal that comes out when instinct prevails, merging this time in the way of evil, while rationality allows blocking this mechanism of counter forces, letting flourish message of hope.

He represents terrestrial and marine worlds in which is reflected the fabulous experience of an artist that composes from nature to give life to what his sensitive sight chooses; even in places it seems not to be any life at all.

Cagnetti’s visionary fantasy is freed in the submarine world

Tommaso Paloscia

Distributing his commitment between restoration and painting, keeping behind, or maybe on top of all, a dental technician diploma that ought to have opened him the gates to a bright career reconstructing back teeth, incisive and canine, that ought to have given back the smile, usually fascinating, to a bunch of Leghornese gentlemen. But Marco Cagnetti, decided to go against the stream, restores art pieces and paints following the line of fantasy that leads him to marine depths, between fish and flowers of unique suggestion. I believe it is a kind of love he took with him when leaving his native Livorno, for moving amongst the traditional friend-foes of the Leghornese, that Pisa people are. Openhearted people still, and art loving for which the city  keeps notorious and revealing testimonials. In Pisa, Cagnetti -the counter stream Leghornese-, has attended the workshop of valuable artists, who he always remind and quotes with the love and devotion of a grateful student. Pratali, Rossana Biagi, Fornaini, Magoni, Lavagno... and others who honor the Pisan tradition, as well as taking the soul of the painter Cagnetti. Happens when he’s moving on marine depths, between waterweed and marvellous flowers, recalling strong reminiscence, expressed in lively and sometimes shocking colours.  It also happens between mossy rocks scattered with other flowers like emerald and ruby gems. In that environment fantastic encounters happen between characters that inhabit dreams. They are young naked women, strong men, that remind the fishermen from Livorno linked to the visions from Sassoscritto and the legends of impossible marine stories and situations that seem to come back to life when furious , the sea breaks against the shore and elevates. Cagnetti keeps the stamps and tones from colours that happen unexpectedly like guardians constantly attentive to that unique order –organized disorder- that the able hand of the artist fill with signals, invented shapes and colours that torn the submarine darkness, like made for identifying human shapes, inviting them to enjoy the show.  A show that renews itself timely, in those strange enterprises which the painter faces while exhibiting in an art gallery, putting them in the public consideration, acknowledging though that the only judge able to understand the effort beyond the creative ability to put together a “festival” of the imagination, is him. Cagnetti, only him.

Moreover, because that mysterious, intriguing world he builds on each canvas, it’s possible to get a hint of the refuge he builds to host his own hopes, his illusions and suffering that art provokes in those who truly practice it.  It always offers to the eye of the hidden spectator, those who stop to snoop, partially hidden by seaweed, his secret encounters with dreamt maidens winged and light as butterflies, who slither from the set, after a brief hug.  Exceptionally, Canetti gives the chance to the inimitable sign of his adoptive town (the leaning tower), of attending beyond water distance, his extraordinary adventures So that it can, discreetly, inform the citizenship. In the meantime, signals are thinning and the palette finds newly chromatic solutions that appear, unexpectedly, lightinign his artistic itinerary, his life.

Florence, July de 2003

Marco Cagnetti:

Complex and articulated personality.  An attentive and introspective observer, who trusts in those primary values of deep friendship and human reciprocity.

Disappointed by human nature looks for a hideout in worlds made of wide spaces where he accentuates imaginary gardens populated by figures that belong to his intimate vision of life.  His is an onirical world, distant but nonetheless unsafe.  Land nurses Baudelerian flowers with carnivore mouths, and hosts anthropomorphic distorted figures who wander around those lustful places, rich in ornament recalling the feminine fertility in ancient symbols.  Noisy colours remain pure and dense. Red, yellow, orange, blue green. They take us to those remote civilizations from countries which he has connected to, by personally inhabiting them, Mexico and Brazil. Those colours, when erupting, express like in violent explosions.

Cagnetti has lately taken his look even beyond, to a different dimension.  Open spaces have today surfaces that widen, getting empty, the immense is his subject, that of being whilst belonging to the cosmos and vacuum at the same time. Colours transform into more reflexive chromatics, they are cold, blue, green, violet, accompanied by vanishing bright as if his thoughts were sticked to the very rarefied space, as if the moment when the artist moves through this time were reflected in his painting with deep meditation; with a desire of regeneration and renewal, coming from the hope of creating new universes where he can get inspiration and beneficial energy to face earthly life.