ARTWORK EIGHTY-SEVEN
"The Harlequins" D Version
“… I like to go back to working with my imagination on emotions and inspirations from the past… it helps me keep them alive…”
(Cesare Catania)
In this digital Artwork the Author retraces the moments that preceded the creation of the Harlequins B Version and creates a work of kinetic and digital art that literally seems to “come out” of the screen.
Year: 2022
Technique: Digital Art
“… The digital version of this work helps me retrace the genesis that led me years earlier to paint that canvas exactly as it is today. This is also what digital art is for, not only to excite the viewer but also to fill the heart of the artist…”
(Cesare Catania)
Description of Harlequins D Version
Two Harlequins playing with each other in an imaginary context: a forest of plants on a summer night. All under a starry sky.
The Artist resumes the scenes immediately preceding the one represented in the B Version, an oil canvas that portrays the two harlequins playing with each other’s heads. This digital version, created mainly to describe the moments immediately before the B Version of 2016 ends up becoming a full-fledged work of digital art. The Author lets himself be involved by emotions and imagines the genesis of that game between two Harlequins as a whirlwind of emotions, stylistically represented by a vortex of elements that literally merge in an enveloping movement to create the canvas of B Version exactly as we see it today.
The final scene shows the two bodies “sinking” into the original canvas, as if the digital and physical artwork ended up coinciding. This technique has already been used in the past by the Author, both in the digital version of “Cubist decomposition: Variations of Trois Hommes (where the inspiration comes from)” and in The Embrace G Version. A way that the Italian artist uses to show how in reality physical art and digital art often coincide, leading to the same final result despite following different paths.
Stylistic Insight
There Geometry becomes a form of Art
In this digital Artwork (later minted in NFT) we can appreciate all the artist Cesare Catania’s love for geometry.
“Breaking reality into simple polygons is the synthesis operation I prefer” (Cesare Catania)
Catania looks at reality from micro to macro and vice versa. It’s just a question of point of view… He is capable of “photographing” the world around him with both a “wide angle” and a “zoom”. All with extreme versatility and naturalness. This also reflects his love for cinema and photography.
His informal art, which over the years has resulted in Cubism, derives from a process of synthesis that leads him to represent the world around him through the juxtaposition of simple polygons. These are often generated by rotary motions of microscopic particles. The world of genesis merges with the world described in the state in which the artist sees it or imagines it, thus ending up creating a work of art that is abstract with respect to the time in which it is thought.
“… the time of origin of the matter and the moment in which the scene is portrayed end up almost coinciding, almost as if in my head the moment before the emotion and the moment in which the scene arouses my attention are almost coincident in an ideal absolute timeline…” (Cesare Catania)
In this “dance” between past and present, the “light motif” is geometry, understood as the material that contains all the forms used by the Italian artist to “sculpt” his contemporary art pieces.
The Importance of Harlequin
For Cesare Catania, Arlecchino represents a milestone in his art and poetics. A comic and dramatic character at the same time, who in some way exemplifies the human race for the author, with all its fragilities and complexities. The first Harlequin was painted by Cesare Catania in 2015, an A Version made with wax pastel and acrylic on paper, then artistically revisited in 2018 with a limited edition run.
Starting from this first work and those to come, contemporary art exhibitions will be created by the Italian artist over the years. We mention just a few of them below:
- in 2018 in Montecarlo at the Meridien Hub Gallery and Harlequin in the Land of the Giants and The Harlequins C Version are exhibited
- In 2019 the Museum of the Villa Reale in Monza hosts a retrospective of Cesare Catania, an exhibition in which, among others, 3 of Cesare Catania’s Harlequins are exhibited
- In 2022 the Metaverse opens its doors to the Harlequins for the first time, exhibiting three versions of the Harlequins among the artist’s many works. The exhibition in Cesare Catania’s personal gallery within the Spatial Metaverse can be online visited from any device.
- On November 17, 2022, the Embrace Project was officially presented at the Palazzo Pirelli of the Lombardy Region on the occasion of which two of Cesare Catania’s Harlequins could be admired
- in March and April 2023, during one of the stages of the Embrace Project on display at the Museum of Poetry in Piacenza, among the 20 exhibited works by Cesare Catania, 2 different Harlequins by Cesare Catania are exhibited
- In June and July 2023, Harlequins in Silicone and Acrylic were exhibited at Cesare Catania’s personal exhibition at Palazzo Donà dalle Rose (exhibition entitled “The Embrace: the Laboratory of Emotions”) and a sculpture was created in the Artist’s Residence belonging to the collection “The Other Side of the Moon” also entitled “Harlequin”
- In November 2023, physical and digital Harlequins will be exhibited within the exhibition entitled “Artistic Sketches: where Inspiration is born” Physical and Digital Harlequins are exhibited.
… and many more …
Cultural Background
The First "Harlequin" is not forgotten for ever...
Above is the first version of Arlecchini by Cesare Catania, a work of art in wax crayon on paper and retouched à la main in acrylic.
The same work was released in a limited edition in 2018, with a colored variant with a gray background which exponentially enhances the figures of the two Harlequins playing with each other. This posture is also taken up in the C Version.
The "Harlequins" Collection by Cesare Catania
Different expressive ways of representing the same Character. A Harlequin for Catania is the representation of ourselves, comical and dramatic at the same time, with all our fragilities and our facets.
Artistic Background
Painting and sculpture first of the Digital Art
Cesare Catania’s digital art was initially born as an attempt by the artist to explain his own physical art, often close to informal – cubist art and for this reason sometimes cryptic for those less close to the field of contemporary art.
However, the way in which the Italian artist represents his character in the harlequin of the Land of the Giants is very clear and leaves no room for misunderstanding. Literally a “drawing mannequin” who wears the clothes of a harlequin and who chases his own head in the middle of red and white checkered sand dunes and who tries to juggle the Giants who play with him and who represent for the artist the Societies and multinationals.
Therefore, before approaching digital art, the Italian artist had a clear idea in his mind and had already clearly represented his characters as “drawing dummies” in several works. However, this is a variant which, unlike the classic mannequin we are used to seeing, is represented only by solids technically generated by the rotation of simple lines.
“I like to think of my characters made up exclusively of rotational solids… the simplicity behind these figures certainly gives my characters a lightness in space that they wouldn’t otherwise have…”
explains Cesare Catania, referring in particular to the bust of his Harlequins generated by the rotation of a straight line to form a cone, the legs and arms generated by the rotation of a parabola to form two elliptical paraboloids coupled together.
This expressive facility in the pictorial field is also easily reflected in the sculpture of Catania which, due to evident affinities with the world of geometry and mathematics, ends up transforming paintings into sculptures and vice versa sculpture into paintings.
“In my path of artistic synthesis I believe that engineering has made its contribution, if only in teaching me to observe reality not only for how it appears to our eyes but at the same time for how it stands… Let’s say that I often think of a work of art at the same time both in terms of how I would like to conceive it from an emotional point of view and how I would like to statically hold it up…” Catania explains
From this point of view, despite being the last of the artistic expressions to arrive in Cesare Catania’s portfolio, digital art represents for the author the right compromise between the spatiality of the forms, the firmness of the colours, the kinetics of the movements and the temporal variability of the scenes. All in one work of art: the digital one.
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