Giovanni D'agostino Biography
Giovanni D'Agostino was born in Catania in 1932. He was an important Italian artist of the 70s and 80s, as well as a teacher of great value at the Academies of Fine Arts in the Italian cities of Urbino, Florence, Bologna and Milan.
His art focused mainly on two fundamental elements: light and research into materials. Light was a central theme in D'Agostino's painting, becoming a true absolute experience and a founding substance. His research into materials was equally important, using wax, copper, neon, rose petals, matches and pine needles to express its profound expressive value.
Light, an intangible but physically perceivable element, was a fundamental material in D'Agostino's work, who tried to evoke it through the chosen materials. Wax, for example, has become a filter through which a clear and evanescent luminosity passes, in which some signs float suspended in space and time. These signs are proof of the artist's appropriation of the visible.
D'Agostino experimented with the possibility of light coming from the translucent matter of the wax, from the "accidents" and its monochromatic luminescences, but also the possibility of time being established in signs and traces, under the ductile skin of the wax, in the acoustic resonances of the gongs that seem to expand in space, in the rhythmic flow of the sign of the Hypotests.
His art represents a profound reflection on the nature of light, materials and time which transforms forms into sources of light and matter loses weight consistency. D'Agostino was an important figure in twentieth-century Italian art and his work continues to inspire and influence contemporary artists.
