In Catania, Via San Michele behind the main street of the town of the city, Via Etnea, looks like a pleasant area where creativity pulsates and comes to life; moving your eyes from one side to the other you notice how each window or wall gives the passerby a breath of fresh air followed by curiosity. A small street, where art and craftsmanship in their most original flair, offers the public welcome, relax and beauty.

In the aforementioned way, the KōArt Gallery was born in 2014, thanks to the will of the art historian Aurelia Nicolosi, which welcomes the new generations and feeds the scenario of today’s contemporary art, proposing figurative and conceptual art and paying attention to trends related to design and photography.

The last event hosted by the KōArt Gallery is a solo exhibition of Pierdonato Taccogna, In the beginning was the sky, born from an idea by the curator Giuseppe Carli and curated in this version, after that of Palermo, by Aurelia Nicolosi and realized in collaboration with the Raffaello art center in Palermo.

Pierdonato Taccogna was born in Triggiano in 1990, he obtained his high school diploma at the state art school “G.De Nittis”, and he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari, a path he suspends to devote himself entirely to art, deepening, thanks to historical research, the study of pictorial techniques.

His poetics makes use of two fundamental elements: light, as an obsession (the artist’s experience lived in 2005, which leads the artist to investigate the world outside reality) and the material, which goes from the preparation of the frame to the drawing up of the last layer of paint.

The light of Taccogna is to be found in those flashes and those typical evanescences of the subconscious sphere: the experience must be lived in first and third person and makes use of sounds and perfumes, almost as if they were flashes that exceed reality.

It is interesting to underline the fact that the artist does not make use of industrial materials, everything is prepared directly by him in his atelier following the recipes of the old masters, a peculiarity that allows him to experiment with new and varied painting techniques.

In the beginning was the sky tells of the bond that exists between man, the terrestrial world and the universe, through science and contemporary art, which can only give us beauty and harmony proper to the most absolute force, Nature. For these reasons and for the following researches, Taccogna undertakes to observe not only himself but also the world around him with careful eyes, because only through this analysis he can arrive at the alchemy that transforms research into poetry.

“In the work of Pierdonato Taccogna – explains the curator Aurelia Nicolosi – we see Turner, Monet, Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh, that is all those painters in which light and color have become fundamental parts of their life and their experimentation. Suspended between past and present, his frames are expertly built by hand and his colors are the result of an ancient artisan preparation that recovers the principles of chemistry and the properties of the elements. His are visions dense with matter, dust and wonder in the face of incommensurable phenomena that man tries in vain to decipher. Together with him we just have to contemplate the wonder and be astonished in front of the explosion of the Universe, told with that passion that only a true artist manages to convey.

And if Galileo for the first time aimed a telescope at the sky, so Pierdonato, like the famous scientist, challenges common stereotypes and false truths, enchanting the public with his visual story in which the sky takes on a sacred aspect, worthy of eternity. His curiosity pushes him far away and no black hole on the horizon will threaten its route and decline “.

Info:

Pierdonato Taccogna. In principio era il cielo
curated by Aurelia Nicolosi
KōArt – Unconventional Place
via San Michele, 28 – Catania

Pierdonato Taccogna, Compositio Stella, olio e vernice su tela-juta, 140 x 140 cm, 77 x 140 cm, 2017

Pierdonato Taccogna, Supernova Green, olio e vernice su tela juta, 50×50 cm, 2017

Pierdonato Taccogna, Hypernova Blue, olio su tela juta, 80×80 cm, 2017