Welcome to Marco Cagnetti’s Gallery!
Were you ever sitting in front of the TV set watching disgusting news and feel like turning it off? 
It happens to me all the time!
Some news make me so anxious that I can hardly understand the world around me, and then… I feel like going out!
I look at the sky, the wandering clouds, those stars that resemble many little diamonds in a box… and I find myself taken by this wonderful nature. It awakens my creativity and inspires my art.
I wish I can transfer my sensations and fears of the present time. To bring back dreams for a while to those who ceased dreaming long ago.
If my works don’t bring about emotions to you… all right then! Turn on the TV set, and stay in Your world! … Mine is surreal.
Marco Cagnetti
“I am like the tide, that grows with the wind
which full of foam and anger breaks
against the rocks
for later go back to return with more strength”
Biography
MARCO CAGNETTI
Marco Cagnetti was born in Livorno (Leghorn) on June 25th 1964. He got his Technical Diplomma in 1984. Later moved to Pisa, where he lives and works, having opened his own studio in Via Visconti 24/a.
Since his youth, in Pisa, has studied with renowned contemporary masters such as Massimo Pratali, Rossana Biagi, Bruno Magoni, Enrico Fornaini and Paolo Lavagno. Looking for enriching his artistic experience brought Cagnetti to meet Antonio Possenti and attending his studio in Lucca .
He’s taken part in many collective exhibitions, while his works are shown in personal exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
Following there’s a list of the main exhibitions in which the artist has participated at.
1987- Red Cross Hall, Buti - Pisa;
1988- Sheraton Hotel Centro Histórico México City;
1989- Municipality of Vicopisano - Pisa;
1989- Grosseto Art School;
1990- Florence Navy Circle;
1991- San Zeno Abbey, Pisa, Gallery “Il Navicello” ,Pisa. Gallery Brunetti , Ponsacco (Pisa) and Pro loco Hall from Marina di Pisa;
1992- Treviso Arts School and Municipality of Barga (Lucca);
1993- Gallery “La Ruota”, Livorno, “Italia USSR” Cultural Association and Florence Youth Center
Marco Cagnetti’s formative path has been shaped by a particular attention to the world of restoration and tecniques of the masters from the past. So, in 1986 he attended a course at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence, and between 1986 and 1989 has followed later courses on restoration of painting on canvas and on wood, achieving the corresponding diplomas.
Works by Marco Cagnetti have been commented on the arts sections of local and national newspapers such as La Nazione, Il Tirreno and L’Osservatore Romano. In-depth critics have been devoted to him by prestigious art magazines such as “Il Quadrato”.
It’s worth remembering that some of his artwork are present in public and private structures from Tuscany, such as Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, the Barga and Pontedera municipalities and the Cultural Association Italy-USSR from Pisa. Other works are in diverse private collections in Italy and abroad, namely México City, Mikonos, Cleaveland, Berlin, Hamburg, Athens and Boston.
The Shows
Marco Cagnetti
SURREAL ATMOSPHERES
In Pisa docks, exhibition space “ARTIS OFFICINA WEB”
From 06/21 to 07/10 open 10 AM - 5 PM
Surreal Atmospheres
by Elisabetta Caporali
"Would not the future artist be he who expressed through an eternal silence an immense painting possessing no dimension?"
Yves Klein
Marco Cagnetti is an artist who lives and works in Pisa, devoted to art for more than 20 years.
His artistic curriculum during such a long time has been enriched by awards and acknowledgements, as well as by countless critics all over Italy
He’s taken part in numerous collective and personal exhibitions like the last one, called Surreal Atmospheres. Twelve works in mixed technique exhibited at the space Artis Officina Web in Pisa.
I’ve known him for several years and I’m positive about his artistic talent, born long ago at restoring antique paintings and sculptures, and then directly in the field of painting, loved with passion and devotion.
Cagnetti’s pictorial research began from his study with artists like Fornaini, Biagi, Possenti and Pratali.
Departing from his own experience, he’s drawn usign the figure as a start, towards an image linked to dreams, as seen on his first works with oil and acrylic colors.
The painter in that period represented the marine environment and that of nature. Inhabited by his “creatures” as well as by teh symbols he drives from his dreams and the inconscious, the clock, the tower, the woman. The male and female figures seen as actors in a post “Adam and Eve” age. They communicate through their forked tongues and their linguistic code. His painting was technically minucious from the bright of oil and acrylic colours, to blue, green and burning red chromatist, re-enacting in Contemporary key the Medieval wooden miniatures.
From surreal landscapes he arrives today to free compositions on a Kandiskian style, freeing from the short brush trace to launch with it in the very fluidity of the intensely chromatic backgrounds. Toning down the the scale of blues, green, violet, yellow and grey helping breath the search for a new world and new creatures to interact with.
Those works reveal decomposition in respect to the symbolic-figurative codes he used before.
Now, pictorial vision is expressed through cell organisms that contain new lives, wandering through the cosmic space, together with little planets from other galaxy, far away worlds in which the Earth and the Moon play a secondary role, as background, giving them an enormous visibility through the beam of light that crosses, from above, all the exposed works.
Such technique breads in painting a magnificent luminous idea.
Pisa, June 2008
Pictorial tecnique
MARCO CAGNETTI’S PICTORIAL TECNIQUE
Energy’s the secret of my art, which finds its expressive ability thanks to the pictorial tecnique representing my artistic evolution. It departs from the blank canvas, with a brush I cover the surface using gouache, usually blue. When its dry I start drawing with a red pencil. After finishing drawing, I fix it with a shellac spray. Having done that, I start colouring using very thin brushes. The colour range I use is wide, with poster colours, oil and acrylic especially those that have glitter in them. I often start with warm colours, such as red, yellow, orange, etc. Later I balance them with cold colours such as blue, green, black, etc. I some cases I use colour mix, like poster with acrylic, due to their common water base. After I finish the painting, I tarnish it completely, in order to give more bright and luminosity to every colour
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.
Marco Cagnetti
Via Musigliano 87
Musigliano
56024
Pisa Tuscany
Italy
Cel: 347 8478312
Internet site, to see the works particular’s:
Art Gallery: Image gallery
Coloured light Cobalt Atmosphere Hideout in the stars
Violet Atmosphere Ark No.1 Magic Nigh
The Star No.2 Circle of Life Star Navigation
DNA of Colour Two Figures Ark No. 3
DNA of Colour Two Figures Ark No. 3
Line Dance The New Planet Two Apples
The three Rings Colour Game New Voyage
The Ice Cream Spectacles The Shaman
The Island Hands Dialogue of the forked tongues
The Flowers Mexican Sunse Young woman with blue stockings
St. George adn the Dragon Angel and Butterfly The Sacred River
Woman on Magic Carpet Blossom of the Soul Homage to Haring
Paradise Shapes Reflected Figure
Hand Cook in Love Stuck
Streets Coloured Geometry The Sphere
The Clock Geometrical Path Space Light
Homage to Miró In Search of Colour Glass Tile
Life The Star Tsunami
The Flight Circles and Triangles Tao
Fantastic World Colour’s Warmth Hand and Star
Simply Abstract Stop Confusion Geometry
Crazily in Love Face The Tower of Pisa
F1 bis F2 F4
F5 F7 Deck Painting