excerpt from official article:

Cesare Catania: One, Two, None, Myself

Circles, lines, spheres, cubes. Reality broken down into simple geometries and reconstructed in the form of art and knowledge.

” Who I am? Good question. They are one, two, three, four people at once, who live together, have found balance, are fine. I am a man, a musician, an engineer, but most of all, a painter and a sculptor. I would like to say: a multifaceted creature. I’m forty, and I don’t wear them particularly well. I am bald, I live between Milan, Monte Carlo and Miami, and I enjoy reality in a full, decidedly full way, yes. I am attentive to details. On the contrary: I’m only attentive to details. I don’t have a lot of memory, I’m not good with consecutio temporum, and in fact I number my works from one up, because remembering their names is difficult. I like colors, especially when they mix. I will never use an assistant to prepare the palette, because mixing, waiting, is the best moment. I like to sculpt, use different materials, seek synthesis. As a child I loved mathematics, classical music, the piano, drawing. I am one who listens and sees both the whole and the individual parts that compose it. The common thread that binds them is my life ».

What shape do these “parts” take in your mind?

They are circles, lines, spheres, cubes. I always have this attitude of breaking down reality into simple polygons. But it is not an engineering exercise, it is an approach to existence and knowledge: when I am faced with anything, be it an emotion or a difficulty, I always look for the cardinal figures that compose it.

When you paint and sculpt, does it generate music or silence in your mind?

Silence is generated, or at least silence is what I seek. I want mental emptiness, something very similar to meditation. Even the rolling away of a passing car can be a nuisance.

Does the physical space around you also have to be clear?

It must be an orderly space, because my eye must be satisfied by a comfortable situation: I would never be able to start from scratch, to face a blank canvas, in a chaotic place. Once I have started the work, however, I like the disorder that is created during the evolution of the painting and sculpture, when the room is filled with new objects, with new colors, which are the same as the palette that forms the image. At that point, chaos becomes harmony.

What color does your mind become when the creative gesture turns into a trance?

Yellow and red: that’s how my emotions settle. Then usually comes the fuchsia, which remains, as well as the pink, which appears and does not go away. At that point I always try to turn everything to black and white, using the strength of the imagination, as if to make a shadow fall on everything: if the work convinces me even so, then I continue and finish it.

He never paints “straight”, therefore.

Never. Although abstract, art for me needs sedimentation. The relationship between the infinity of ideas and the delimited space of the canvas requires a long time.

Works born at night, with a free mind and genuine inspiration.

Do you ever get awakened by urgent dreams, to be translated immediately into painting?

It often happens to me, kidnapped by the rush to run to my studio to give body to everything I feel inside. Almost all my works were born at two in the morning, which for an artist is the best time of the day: you have a light head and the inspirations appear genuine and recognizable, without the buzz of the world.

What kind of bondage is it, being creative?

I do not experience it as a slavery, on the contrary: its lack would represent the greatest frustration. Creativity possesses me so much that I often find myself having to harness it, because unfortunately, and I say this in quotation marks, I also have a life to live: deadlines, affections, duties. So, I try to select only the deserving information: otherwise, I would be overwhelmed. A simple tea, a dinner, a concert, an object. Everything, for me, can become a painting.

“A dinner, a concert, an object. Everything can become a picture”.

What is your greatest utopia?

Dedicate myself exclusively to artistic production, without collateral commitments, without interference figures between me and action. Life outside of art is a commitment to be done as quickly as possible, to then go back to creating.

Happiness therefore lies in the most unbridled selfishness?

Of course, and it’s immediate: you just need to do what you want. And then take a moment in front of the sun, especially when it reflects in the sea.

Painter and engineer, Cesare Catania lives between Milan, Montecarlo and Miami. His works by him, he renamed them “ingenuity works”.