Claudio Cargiolli Biography
Claudio Cargiolli was born in 1952 in Ponzanello, a small village near Fosdinovo. He attended art high school and then later the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, the city where he lives and works. From the beginning, curious, free, he favors imagination and fantasy, far from any concession to fashion, but always attentive and rigorous in seeking good painting and in experimenting with the ancient techniques and pictorial devices most congenial to him. From 1968 onwards he participated in numerous painting exhibitions at a very young age. His first solo exhibition took place in 1971, at the Fillungo gallery in Lucca, curated by the critic and great art historian Pier Carlo Santini, who followed him for many years in his artistic research. With these early experiences, he continued his journey until he graduated from the Academy in 1974. The artist Cargiolli's painting of those years, of training, research, experimentation, is characterized by a production dominated by enigmatic subjects, figures of faces erased and composed in fragments. From 1983 and in the years that followed, Cargiolli managed to assign order to his visions and shape to his dreams, painting began to consolidate precisely to the extent that volumes, shapes and objects were placed on the canvas in a fantastic story. The juxtapositions bordering on inconsistency between different scenes, visions and descriptions contribute to the construction of a contemporary but metaphysical art, suffused with poetry, unreal and yet reassuring, despite its impossibility. He begins with a painting with strong gestural and coloristic connotations. As the years pass, the chromatic scale attenuates to reach the linguistic figure of his current work, through meticulous technical conduct attentive to every minimum declination of pictorial terms. This process of research and work increases and materializes from the second half of the 80; from that period began the collaboration with the Forni gallery in Bologna and the highly prestigious exhibition cycle in Italy and abroad. Of note among the numerous personal exhibitions and collective participations are the anthologies held at Palazzo Ducale in Massa and Palazzo Ducale in Urbino.
