Gastone Cecconello
Biographical notes
edited by Alice Actis
“After all, my life has always been a
attempt to keep my feet on the ground but my
eyes have always been turned toward the
firmament.”
Gastone Cecconello
Gastone Secondo Cecconello was born on March 2, 1942, in Vercelli. His father, Pasquale, was a sunny man who was a laborer and had a lot of inventiveness and manual dexterity. Given the tight economic circumstances, he was able to adapt to doing a little bit of everything: he made his children’s clothes himself, cut their hair, fixed shoes, built himself objects and furniture, and raised chickens, geese, rabbits and pigs. The mother, Salute Tasso, known as Maria, was a woman of robust physique and strong practical sense, who got by as best she could, caring for the family and doing a wide variety of jobs, even during her many pregnancies. Pasquale and Maria, of Veneto origin, had moved to Vercelli with a bicycle and a cart in 1927, when Maria was eight months pregnant with their first child. At that time Veneto was a poor region, and the lack of work had driven many to seek their fortunes in Lombardy or Piedmont, where economic conditions were more prosperous and where industries were developing. In Vercelli, the Chatillon synthetic fiber company was increasing production and required many workers. It was there that Pasquale would find work.
Gastone was the fifth of six children: Gastone, Lia, Carla, Giulio, Gastone Secondo, and Loredana. Two years before Gastone Secondo’s birth the family balance would be broken by the sudden death of his older brother, Gastone, who at the age of fourteen was run over by a contractor’s car. From grief, the mother had fallen into a heavy depression, and despite repeated attempts at healing (which did not exclude electroshock and hypnosis), Maria would regain her strength and inner balance only after the birth of her penultimate child, to whom she would give the same name as the deceased firstborn.
The early years of little Gaston Secondo’s life coincided with the war years, of which he remembers above all that sense of atavistic hunger that gripped him and his siblings daily, which they tried to appease by sneaking fruit from neighboring trees. The family’s financial straits strained their daily existence and left everyone with a heavy sense of frustration: “One sunny afternoon at the Sacred Heart Oratory I am alone eating carob berries on a merry-go-round that goes round and round, not having the ten liras to get into the priests’ cinema, and I feel sad and bored. This feeling has marked me all my life, and to escape it I have always invented an infinity of thoughts and jobs.”[1]
Fomenting this state of distress in 1947 would also come the serious accident in which he was run over by a speeding car in the very same place where his brother had lost his life seven years earlier. Fortunately, Gastone had suffered only fractures, but their severity would force him into the hospital for more than eight months: “They were the saddest eight months of my life,” he would note a few years later.
Stuck in bed with broken ribs, a cast on his right leg and a concussion celebrating, the child distracted himself only with drawing. With a few worn-out crayons he applied cheese and sugar that Grandpa Angelo got him on the cards. With Grandpa Angelo Gastone had a great relationship; he was the person with whom he talked the most and who most embodied his family’s Veneto origins, about which he often told amusing anecdotes. With much sadness he would say goodbye to him for the last time when, at the ripe old age of 96, he was cut down by throat cancer.
That accident, which happened by fatality in the same place where his brother had died, had tested him physically and psychologically and made him obsessed with death. For a long time the fear of not being able to pass the age of fourteen would accompany him and wear him down: “I lived in a state of deep consternation convinced that I would not pass the years that my brother lived. I was terrified every time I had to cross the street and suffered from attacks of epilepsy and states of depression. I found serenity by taking refuge in the parallel world I was building for myself: painting. When I turned 14, everything vanished and I returned to a peaceful life.”
He was forced to ambulate with the help of crutches because his right leg had suffered a very serious injury that forced him to attend corrective gymnastics classes every week, which he would practice for more than a year with the support of his brother-in-law Oronzo. The accident and his natural inclinations made Gastone a peculiar child, so much so that in his family, dusting off his Venetian origins, they had nicknamed him “el mato”: “I was never a quiet child like my peers, I was always looking for something. At home they did not call me by name but called me el matoformy abnormal behavior. When I was not drawing I would go to the grove near the house and with branches and branches I would build huts where I would isolate myself from the world, carve sticks and invent all sorts of artifacts.”
At the age of fourteen, having achieved good health through corrective gymnastics, he became interested in artistic gymnastics and joined the Pro Vercelli men’s team, also participating with the latter in the 1958 national championships in Naples: “Two passions haunted me: painting and artistic gymnastics. I had to choose.”
In any case, artistic gymnastics never kept him away from painting and drawing, which he practiced constantly even during school hours. In fourth grade he had been caught by teacher Aquilini drawing a nude woman for a friend, and as punishment he had sent him back to the very subject in which he excelled: drawing.
Gastone attended Walter Manzone State Elementary School, and until the age of ten his studies were always regular, even during the time he spent in the hospital, thanks to the lessons he was given privately. He would earn his middle school diploma, however, much later, at the age of 28.
In 1952, in view of his excellent artistic abilities, Principal Zabrino had given him the assignment to execute five large plates illustrating the respiratory, digestive and vascular systems, which he would then display in the school corridors: “For the occasion, I was provided with five white boards and a shiny new box of crayons: as I made them, all my classmates, including the teachers, clutched at me in curiosity and surprise; after about half an hour, the principal asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’, I answered him without hesitation, ‘Butcher!'”
In 1956 he moved with his family to Carluccio Gallardi Street in the center of the city, where in the attic he had carved out two small rooms independent of the house to use as a studio. Here he could cultivate his passion for painting, which was becoming increasingly pressing. However, the family’s economic condition soon forced him to seek employment, and after trying several trades, he chose the one that left him time to paint: a baker. Working at night, during the day he could lock himself in his studio and struggle with what would become the capricious companion of his whole life: “After several jobs, welder, painter, mason, I chose to be a baker because by working from midnight to noon I could be free in the afternoon to be a painter.”
When he was only twelve years old, he painted a significant portrait of his mother Maria and began to make friends with other local painters, with whom he occasionally went to paint en plein air. One of these was Laerte Bertotti, thirteen years his senior, and the other was Professor GiuseppeRaviglione, who in those years was working on billboards for Cinzano.
There was no shortage of relationships with other artists, then, allowing him to engage with those who had long mastered that art, but also to become more aware of his own abilities. What distinguished him was his fast and spontaneous way of working, and this thing, when he worked in the open air, always attracted a swarm of people.
Even at that time Cecconello was constantly searching for new materials: from chalk to elderberries, from charcoal to soot, all kinds of materials held an irresistible fascination for him. But most of all he searched frantically for bricks, so that he could crush them, dilute them with water and use them as colors. When resources allowed, he did not hesitate to buy a few tubes of oil color: “During the three summer months of school break, from eight o’clock in the morning to seventeen o’clock I used to go and help Mr. Michele a peddler of sweets who set up his stall in Vercelli’s Piazza dei Pesci, and with the first tips I received I went to Mr. Leone’s and bought three tubes of oil color: I was thrilled in that store full of wonders and the scent of linseed oil, turpentine and turpentine.”
Cecconello’s studio on Via Gallardi, in the heart of Vercelli, just a few steps from the cathedral, would later become a true cultural club open to artists, literati and musicians including Angelo Gilardino, Renzo Averone, and Adriano Nosengo: “My studio became a real university that I had created for myself within the walls of my home.”
Angelo Gilardino, a classical guitarist and composer at the international level, was his neighbor back in the day. They were often in the studio on Via Gallardi and it happened that without conversing they would spend entire evenings together, one playing and the other painting. “I went there every night to play,” Gilardino recalls, “practicing while he worked. We would pull the wee hours often without saying a word, caught like two obsessed by the anxiety to grow and do well, isolated in a city that […] of painting and music didn’t give a damn. Our respective bustle kept us mutually awake. […] there, I was introduced by my friend to modern painting, from Cézanne to Jackson Pollock […] and I introduced him to twentieth-century music, from Debussy to Boulez and, as I could, some modern poetry as well.” [2]Gastone appreciated so many aspects of Gilardino, especially that of being a self-taught musician and being able to speak and write five languages correctly: “The person who most marked my human and artistic formation was Angelo Gilardino, for me it was a real university and a deep friendship was born that after half a century is still alive.”
Mario Pistono had met him at the age of seventeen; the two were more than ten years apart. Mario was already a painting teacher. He was among the organizers of the International Painting Exhibition in Santhià, figured as president of the Pro Loco, and was fully introduced into the cultural environment of Vercelli. A beautiful and lasting friendship would be born between them.
Instead, Cecconello and Corgnati had met in 1984, when the director had invited him to dinner at his home in Maglione to enjoy one of his signature dishes: risotto alla francescana: This is how Corgnati described his friend Gastone in those years: “The broad forehead, the dark, sharp eyes, looking straight ahead, sensible and parche the words of his mouth but festive this of a sincere and frank laughter; massive and elastic build: this is Gastone Cecconello. A quiet man, who could have seen that famous John Ford film. This may be true; but behind those calm eyes burns a raging fire. For in reality Cecconello is a volcano in full swing” [3]. And how can you blame him?
His attraction to the visual arts particularly involved him, so much so that he did not give up, despite his limited means, his increasingly assiduous visits to exhibitions and museums, among which it is important to mention his first visit to the Egyptian Museum in Turin in 1958: “I was at the train station waiting for the train to visit the Egyptian Museum, I received a powerful feeling.”
In 1961 he would visit the Thompson Collection on display at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin, during which he would view Picasso’s work for the first time, which initially left him indifferent. Only after carefully studying his work would he finally understand its artistic greatness. Picasso’s influence would later lead him to abandon his old artistic models, among which he included the great Renaissance artists of the stature of Antonello da Messina, Mantegna, and Raphael, in order to take an entirely new path and better tell the story of his own time: “The artist is like a seismograph, he must record the tremors of his time,” he was fond of repeating.
The first person to notice Gastone’s artistic talent was Professor Enzo Gazzone, then director of the Institute of Fine Arts in Vercelli, who, after observing him for about half an hour while he was painting a view of Via Duomo on his easel, invited him to enroll in the Institute’s courses, offering to pay the fees himself. But his attendance at first-year classes was sporadic and lasted barely two months. The first-year programs and exercises included things Cecconello had now acquired on his own, and those classes were a waste of time for him. For this reason he was moved directly to the third year and, to entice him to attend, the director had even given him the keys to go to paint whenever he wanted.
On those afternoons, in the deep silence of those classrooms rich in history and art, enveloped by the smell of colors and turpentine, Cecconello enjoyed uncovering the plaster casts (wrapped in dusty white sheets, which made them all look the same, like ghosts) to copy them in charcoal. It was exciting to confront those forms, to transcribe them and bring them to life on the sheet or canvas, to dialogue with the past and translate it into the present. Unfortunately, however, just on the eve of the graduation exam, Gastone decided to leave school for good. Failure to graduate, however, would in time be a source of worry. Nearly all of his classmates had gone on to academic studies, some at Brera, some at the Albertina, and to make up for this educational deficiency Cecconello would set out on a restless and frenzied quest.
Sometimes his work as a painter also gave him some financial satisfaction. The first sale was in 1955, to the tobacconist in the Canada district. It was a small oil-painted copy of a Modigliani portrait that earned him 3,000 liras. The second involved a vase of flowers, which a friend of his mother’s allegedly bought for 5,000 liras right under the astonished and incredulous eyes of Maria, who could not understand how someone could spend so much money on something that was not of primary necessity. Finally, in 1957, as he was passing in front of the city antique dealer’s window with a painting of white flowers under his arm, he was stopped by the owner who sat there and bought the canvas for 15,000 liras. If the first two sales might have been a fluke, the third convinced Gastone that perhaps his work could have a following among the public and collectors, although, he proudly likes to emphasize, “I never sought anything, it was others who wanted to make me something.”
In fact, in 1959 it would take the City of Vercelli to offer him his first solo exhibition at the Palazzo dei Centori, where subsequent exhibitions in 1961 and 1962 would also be held. At his first exhibition he had exhibited about 80 works, which would arouse much appreciation from the public and scholars. On that day Gastone took another small revenge: “Among the audience was also the teacher Aquilini, who had sent me back to fourth grade in drawing, who complimented my mother.”
The exhibition intrigued many, including the head of the Lake Maggiore Tourist Board, which then contacted him to create the advertising posters, and the painter, caricaturist and journalist Francesco Leale, who reportedly published an article in the local newspaper “Amico del popolo” that put the young colleague’s work in a good light.
From that moment on, a mutual acquaintance began between Leale and Cecconello. Leale invited him to attend meetings of the “Forme” Group, which were held every Thursday evening at the Taverna Tarnuzzer pastry shop under the arcades of Piazza Cavour. Professor Carlo Bosio, Renzo Roncarolo and Francesco Donati were also members of the group. However, although he continued to hang out with the group’s members, his participation in the debates lasted only a few weeks to Gastone discussing sitting around a café table seemed just a waste of time. He who already had little time could not afford to sacrifice one evening a week philosophizing. But the influence of their ideas would not be underestimated.
Some paintings from those years betray a meditation on Guttuso’s work and on the Informal, for example,Self-Portraitfrom1958 and The Battle of Roosters(1960).
In the meantime, he had changed jobs first to become the helper of a local plumber and then to be a commercial agent, a profession he would practice until retirement age.
From 1960 to 1962, he was called to military service in Avellino, in the province of Naples, at the recruiting center and from where, after various psychological and aptitude tests, he was sent to the tank training center in Persano, a town not far from Eboli. After the tank driver course, he is transferred to Legnano, in the Alberto da Giussano armored division. Even during this period he did not give up art: he made portraits of his comrades and painted canvases inspired by the work of Klee, Kandijnsky and Picasso. Works from this period include an entire portfolio of watercolors, each accompanied by a short thought on moments of military life, and Fish, executed on a tank canvas. Readings during those months were varied: from Proust to Montale, Garcia Lorca to Ungaretti.
While serving for the army, Cecconello was commissioned to build a model of the NATO military polygon at Decimo Mannu, an area that stretched some 20 kilometers in southern Sardinia, from the beach to Mount Bracaxius. In ten days, Gastone, aided by some fellow soldiers, completed a 5-by-4-meter model, which was displayed with much official ceremony at the Capo Teulada command post. For this assignment he then received an extra award of 20,000 liras and a six-day leave, which he would use with his comrades to visit Sardinia, a rugged and fascinating land, of which he long retained the memory of the burning scents and colors.
A week before he was to leave for the military, Cecconello had met 19-year-old Maria Milan, a young woman of Venetian descent who lived in Casalvolone, in the province of Novara, and whom he would marry once he finished his military service. The young couple went to live first in a rented apartment in Vercelli, on Via Boccaccio, and later in Olcenengo, where their firstborn son Manuele was born in 1969.
In the meantime, Cecconello’s painting aroused the interest of some gallery owners in Vercelli, who would organize two solo shows of his work: in 1962 at the Viotti Art Gallery and in 1966 at the Spa Commissionaria.
From 1964 Gastone began to become familiar with a new artistic technique: photography. It will be a passion that he will cultivate intensely until 1969 and then more and more sporadically for a few more years.
Between 1970 and 1982, he lost both parents. Father Pasquale was cut down by incurable lung cancer, and a few years later mother Maria died of bronchitis contracted in the hospital while hospitalized for a fractured femur.
By the 1970s the changes in Gastone’s life would be innumerable: married life, the birth of his first child, and his first exhibitions outside Vercelli, at the Bonicelli Art Gallery in Milan and the Olmio Art Center in Turin; while, in Vercelli at the premises of the historic Studio Dieci.
In 1970, through his friend Alfredo Raviglione, he met the Argentine painter Franc Oldering, 15 years older and with whom a beautiful friendship would be born that would last at least 20 years, until Oldering’s passing. “What I admired most was the child in him,” Cecconello recalls.
In 1972 he met Adriano Parise, a printer from Colognola ai Colli, a town not far from Verona, who had traveled to Piedmont to visit the National Painting Exhibition in Santhià to meet new artists. His plan was to publish a luxurious diary in which each month would be punctuated by the color reproduction of a painting by a young artist. In Santhià Parise met Mario Pistono, who referred him to Gastone Cecconello, with whom a cohesive friendship and lasting collaboration would soon be born. This experience would begin Adriano’s substantial contemporary art collection, in which many of Cecconello’s works are featured. Moreover, within a few years, Adriano Parise, with enthusiasm and rare entrepreneurial passion, founded his own publishing house, which Gastone has always relied on for his publications.
In 1972 he viewed Lucio Fontana’s work for the first time, and in a rather bizarre way: “I was in Laveno Mombello, on Lake Maggiore, with some friends to visit the studio of the artist Albino Reggiori, when outside a bar we started chatting with a framer; after a quick exchange of words, the man invited us into his workshop to view some canvases that a faucet industrialist, whose tracks he had lost following bankruptcy, had left him to frame. These were three large canvases with tears, cross cuts and pieces of stained glass glued on, complete with the author’s signature on the back. The framer, unconcerned as to who the author was, offered to buy them for the price of the frames alone that he had had to unnecessarily make, 90,000 liras, but we, somewhat perplexed and wary, would have barely reached that price so we did not accept the purchase and drove home again, losing a great opportunity forever.”
The works of these years bear signs of a further development of his art, which expressed an increasing rejection of nihilism and prevailing capitalism, expressed beginning in 1973 by the Businessmen series, which he made on the stylistic influence of Francis Bacon. His love of experimenting with materials, which had led him to deal with photography, terracotta, wood, and iron, resulted in his experimentation with ytong, a kind of amalgam based on marble dust, which had been brought to him from France by his artist friend Adriano Nosengo. With this cement mix, which is lighter and more ductile than concrete, Cecconello would make almost all his sculptures in the following years and begin to put his new series of “incasellamenti” to good use. Starting with the small wooden boxes that once contained philadelphia cheeses, Cecconello makes a series of small cells in which he distributes half-length figures molded with ytong. The parody of the human being, now restricted of his freedom and condemned to be identified only by aseptic numerical series (from the vat number to the tax code) is a discomfort he feels when, in 1974, he has to open the vat number to work part-time as a sales agent for the Vismara cold cuts company. The thought of being important more as a number than as a man throws him into a growing anguish that leads him to reflect on the change in society and how human beings have become nothing more than a sequence of numbers and letters. It is from there that the “embeddings “of the human figure arise, first closed like tabernacles and then open like the sections of an archive. Finally, after letting himself be attracted for years by great artists and various expressive currents, between 1976 and 1977, with these human busts he arrives at the distinctive cipher of his work. He left aside landscapes and portraits, that is, the painting he had practiced up to that time, to devote himself body and soul to this new creative strand. The only exception was the portrait of Indira Gandhi, which the Indian prime minister was to place in the Congress Hall in New Delhi. The important commission came from his friend Lino Cremon (the Gandhi family’s official photographer), who had his studio in Biella and to whom Gastone occasionally turned for photographic reproductions of his paintings. Gastone had an open account and a now substantial debt with Cremon, who had proposed that he settle it by agreeing to do a portrait of the Indian premier. Gastone had at first declined, because by then he was in the midst of a whole other kind of experimentation, but the debt was too substantial and so he accepted the assignment. In 1980, starting with a photo of Cremon, he made a large portrait (50 x 70 cm) of Gandhi, who just on January 14 of that year had begun her second term as India’s leader.
In 1974, he gave a refresher course to about 30 artists in Santhià, and in this same year Elena, his second child, was born.
In 1977 he and some friends founded “L’Aquilonaria,” an association that built large artistic kites and whose motto was “Higher and higher.”
The following year, with the Biella exhibition at the “L’uomo e l’Arte” gallery he finally achieved the breakthrough he deserved. He had exhibited about 60 works there, all of the latest generation, and finally found progressive interest from the public and collectors who bought him several works, while important critics and gallery owners would later visit his studio. One of these was Omar Aprile Ronda founder of the Engravers’ Club (Dialogues Club), who in 1982 proposed that he etch ten large plates to put in his club. This was the beginning of his recognition abroad as well: in October 1985 he exhibited at the Hamburg State University, the following year in Rotterdam (first at the University, then at the Trefcentrum Gallery), in 1987 at the Institute of Italian Culture in Vienna, and in 1988 at Columbia University in New York. In Italy, however, he often participated in painting competitions at the national and international level, winning first prize several times, as in the case of the 6th Contemporary Painting Competition in Trivero (in 1986) and the 20th and 26th Contemporary Painting Exhibition in Santhià, in 1983 and 1989, respectively.
In the meantime, he also devoted himself to public works, which in 1979 saw him involved in the Monument to the Fallen of the Resistance for the 35th anniversary of the Santhià Massacre, commissioned by the Santhiatese section of the National Association of Italian Partisans (inaugurated on May 4, 1980), while in 1984 he created his largest work in size, 5 x 2.5 m, which was displayed in the council chamber of the town of Gaglianico, a municipality in which he resided from 1972 to 1992. The work represents community administrators and was inaugurated by then Prime Minister Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. In 1986 the Santhià Diving Club commissioned him to create a work commemorating the Walser people: a bronze cross made by Gastone was inaugurated on October 12 and placed in the bed of the headwaters of the Sesia River in Alagna.
In 1988, together with 10 other artists (including Staccioli, Di Cocco and Urano Palma), critic Pierre Restany and photographer Fabrizio Garghetti, he participated in the project, financed in part by the European Community and in part by the Piedmont region, to create ten large works to be placed in the Lame del Sesia National Park. The sketches were displayed at the Park headquarters in Albano. Gastone had planned to make an intervention that would blend in with the trees and boulders of the park. A structure of three cast bronze trees 10 meters high, tied at the top like a tepee, and a series of sloping boulders of sloping size that filled its interior space. To date, this ambitious project still awaits to see the light of day.
In the 1980s he approached fresco painting. The first time he tried his hand at this new technique was in 1982, in San Paolo Cervo, near Biella, where to a stonemason who was fixing up his hut, Gastone offered to create a fresco on the facade. The 60 x 80 cm fresco depicts stone breakers intent on their work: “This was my first fresco, I never imagined what would happen later.”
This experience would constitute the incipit of the activity of the “Consorteria dei Figuranti,” known as the “Tectores Errantes,” formalized by the Manifesto written by Mario Pistono and signed on September 8, 1984 by Gastone (who was also the group’s coordinator), Sergio Alice, Enzo Bellini, Alberto Cropelli, Annibale Follini, Giulio Picelli, Mariano Pieroni, Epifanio Pozzato, and Vanni Saltarelli. The ambitious project was actually born the previous year when, moving to live in Gaglianico, a small town in the province of Biella, Gastone had made contact with Maurizio Corgnati, who lived in Maglione. A long association and fruitful intellectual exchange began between the artist and the director. Both had coalesced in their desire to change the face of Maglione, convincing a number of artists to fresco the facades of the houses with one of their works, a bit like what had happened in Arcumeggia between 1956 and 1970, where along the narrow streets of the small village one could admire frescoes by Achille Funi, Aldo Carpi, Gianfilippo Usellini, Giuseppe Migneco, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Giuseppe Monanari, Aligi Sassu, Gianni Dova and many others. Before long, this project became a reality. On Sept. 20, 1983, the day of the patronal feast of St. Maurice, Reggiori, Trolese, Follini, Cropelli, Alice, Saltarelli, Pieroni, Picelli, Bellini and Carena, with Cecconello at the head, set to work to create MACAM, Maglione’s Museum of Contemporary Art Outdoors. The success would be such that for many more years many other artists would lend their talents to leave a trace of their passage in Maglione. From this project would come another: the creation of a monument to the farmer to honor Maglione’s agricultural tradition. What Cecconello had in mind was a stele about ten meters high and assembled from pieces of farm machinery brought by the farmers themselves. His idea reached the ears of Silvano Gilardi, who was going to offer him his collaboration, which Gastone, however, declined. However, about ten days later, on his way to Maglione for work Cecconello found already erected in the square a jumble of junk, which did not even faintly reflect the original idea. From that time Cecconello would never again go to Maglione: “That was the last time I went to Maglione. Maurizio came to my house and did everything he could to bring me to the right path, but it was useless. Maglione for me was a beautiful adventure that ended sadly.”
His fresco interventions would not stop because together with the Consorteria dei Figuranti he would continue to create frescoes throughout Piedmont: in 1983 for the municipality of Piane Sesia and at Villa del Bosco; the following year at Pratrivero and in the hamlet of Mazzucco in Trivero; at Santhià in the Piazza del Comune in 1989, in the Piazza dei Pittori in 1997, at the Mobilificio Bono 2006 and for the Church of S. Agata in 2002; in Chiaverano in 1989; in Acqui Terme in 1990; in Boccioleto in 1994; in Crescentino in 1989 in Caresanablot for the Martinotti Chapel in 1986; in Prarolo for the Trebbie estate in 1990; in Vigliano for the Gardiman factory first in 1989 and then in 2002; in Colognola ai Colli on the Parise house in 1982; in Salussola on the city gate and on the Museum of Gold and Stone in 2005, at the Tura house in 2008, at the Asilo in 2008, for the Pro Loco banner in 2006, and for the rehabilitation of the fontanin in 2004; in Bioglio in 1997 and 2000 (where he coordinated the initiative and himself depicted the meeting of Jesus with his mother); in Romano di Lombardia in 1997; in Muzzano at the Salesians in 2000; in Biella on Via Don Minzoni on the facade of the House of Charity in 2003; in Vergnasco for the kindergarten in 2005; in Sandigliano for the parish house in 2005; in Cerrione for the Magnonevolo church in 2007; in Salasco for the L’Armistizio restaurant in 2006; in Masserano for the Ria house; in Cavaglià in 2008; in Casale Monferrato for the Family House in 2010.
In 1983 he won first prize “Gaudenzio Ferrari” at the 20th International Contemporary Art Competition in Santhià with a painting entitled “Isola.” The event has a great deal of resonance in the local and national press, which does its best to report on Cecconello’s work and painting.
In 1984, the first monograph on the artist was published by Adriano Parise types (of Colognola ai Colli near Verona). It was presented by Mario Pistono, Maurizio Corgnati and Mariano Pieroni.
Since 1985, after winning the silver medal of Pope John Paul II at the 8th National Competition of Painting and Graphics, organized in Bussolengo (Vr) under the high patronage of the Presidency of the Republic. During several weekends spent with his friend and publisher Adriano Parise, he met Daniel Spoerri, Hermann Nisch, Mondino, Sarenco, Miccini, Hadorf, Günter, Costa, Margonari, and Nagel.
Also in 1985, at the 5th Contemporary Painting Competition of the City of Trivero, he won 3rd prize with the work Composition. The jury included Maurizio Corgnati, Omar Aprile Ronda, Mario Pistono and Ido Novello.
In 1986, in the wake of Maglione’s experience, he had yet another insight and founded Bond’Arte. Celso spent his summers in Bonda, a hamlet of Mezzana Mortigliengo, in the province of Biella, where Gastone had bought a small house. The hamlet was virtually uninhabited and infested with nettles, but soon, in the wake of Cecconello and his friend’s enthusiasm, other owners would also begin to show interest in the idea. Within a short time, Cecconello called a host of painter friends to Bonda (among them Luciano Pivotto, Giancarlo Cazzaniga, Antonio Carena, Simon Benetton, Carla Crosio, Albino Reggiori and many others), who for the second time gave life to a true open-air art museum, with more than 150 frescoes, but also to a center of cultural ferment animated by poets, musicians and literary figures. In the summer of 1989, for example, Anna Loro, the first harp of the Arena di Verona, played within those walls, followed the next year by the Albatros trio and organist Arturo Sacchetti.
On Oct. 5, 1987, he was awarded the “City of Todi” prize by the citizen Artistic Center of Cultural Activity “New Era.” Cecconello had been pointed out by Mario Pistono.
In October 1988 the second monograph was published, again with Parise Editions, which has no critical text, but only a review of about a hundred of the artist’s works produced in the last twelve years. The volume will be officially presented on October 21 in Gaglianico’s council chamber on the occasion of the city’s first millennium celebrations.
In 1989, ten years after his first exhibition, Cecconello returned to exhibit at the Auditorium of Santa Chiara in Vercelli, with an anthological review intended to trace the entire itinerary of his production.
In 1991 he bought a 3,000-square-meter plot of land in Salussola on which he would have a new house built with a studio and a large warehouse for his works: “I thought this studio would be enough for me until the end of my life, but today after twenty years it is almost uninhabitable.” It is an important moment, so much so that he even dedicates to it the exhibition “Trasloco,” at the Il Quadro gallery in Biella (Nov. 22-Dec. 31, 1991): “The aseptic order,” Gilardino writes, “that usually reigns in Gastone Cecconello’s studio has been disrupted, in these weeks, by the preparations for the imminent move, from Gaglianico to Salussola. Canvases and polymaths, out of the case that rigorously stows and protects them, seem to be in a state of war. That’s how a gallery owner from Biella, who had been planning a solo exhibition of the artist’s work for a long time, caught them,” Gilardino recalls on the invitation brochure. The exhibition had at the center of the exhibition space an accumulation of packed canvases, packed papers and rolls ready to be loaded, while on the walls canvases dripping with matter and color.”
In 1992 he received a request for a meeting with Salamon, an American manager at the head of an organization that promoted artists at all levels by promoting their exhibitions in Italy and abroad, who, after seeing MACAM, proposed to Cecconello a contract of collaboration, but all those papers full of clauses and penalties made Gastone fear losing his freedom and he renounced it: “For me, painting is the only moment of absolute freedom.” He never regretted that choice.
Also from the 1990s is a solo exhibition of his work at the Palazzo della Regione in Turin. On that occasion he made the acquaintance of philosopher and poet Guido Ceronetti, who complimented the gesturality and generosity of his painting. Two years later Cecconello is called to serve on the jury of the National Exhibition of Contemporary Painting in Trivero, where from the 12th edition onward he has always been present.
Of particular note in November 1999 was Alberto Fumagalli’s solo show at Galleria Effe due in Bergamo, where he exhibited Omaggio a Piero della Francescae Nero di Praga, a series he had prepared for an exhibition in the Czech capital, curated by Enrico Mascelloni, and which was to be held the following January but never actually took place.
His artistic talent continued to attract artists to his studio; in particular, his relationship with the Istrian painter Romano Conversano (1920-2010), to whom Manuele Cecconello would dedicate a documentary, and the Biella painter Guido Mosca (1913-1983), author of the large fresco on the high altar of the new Biella Hospital church, was intense. In 2001 he received the Renzo Roncarlo Memorial Award, organized by the municipality of Olcenengo.
He did not lose sight of public works either, on which he returned to try his hand in 2004, creating a polymateric sculpture for the Ecomuseo del Cossatese e delle Baragge in Castellengo, and three years later he would make a commitment to the mayor of Cavaglià to paint a cycle of frescoes following the example of Maglione and Bond’Arte. With five other artists, including Gianni Bolis, Annibale Follini, Picelli, Nosengo and Sergio Albano, Cecconello painted one of the six frescoes that now decorate the facade of the houses.
In 2000, he exhibited at the Man Arte Gallery in Paris, where he presented his untitled Storielle: a cycle of works with relief figures made with sand, glue and powder mixtures and flat backgrounds.
In 2002, at the 39th edition of the Santhià Prize, he won the Giangiacomo Spadari National Prize established by Grafica Santhiatese Editrice with The Neverending Story. The jury of five critics (Mezzacapo, Mistrangelo, Pasquali, Pistono and Seveso) evaluated the work that best responded to the theme: “Theater – cinema… persuasive muses for painting, sister art.”
Four years later he exhibited a selection of his most important cycles at the Maison de la Mer in the French resort of Cavalaire sur Mer on the French Riviera.
A year later is another important solo exhibition of his in Gazoldo degli Ippoliti with polymateric works made between 1995 and 1997 and curated by his friend Angelo Gilardino, who writes: “in the rigor of his representation, Cecconello multiplies the power of the sphinx by insinuating its presence in every object, even the most banal and innocuous, which sometimes finds a soul in a (previously unsuspected) “in itself,” sometimes acquires it in the relationships established with other objects, equally (previously) insignificant.”[4]
In recent years, all his work has focused on framing objects that he steals from reality to enclose them in boxes with a strong metaphysical flavor. But, he does not forget painting, which he now favors wide expanses of luminous color, inhabited by those stylized figures, which he himself has always defined as the parody of man, but now reduced to pure outline.
On March 2, 2012 Cecconello writes in his diary, “Manuele announces to me that for this year in December there will be two major exhibitions at the museum in Biella and at Arca in Vercelli work, the one to realize these two events, which will take us a long time: I don’t paint anymore, I feel empty, I have no more stimulus either to draw or to do anything else, to pass the time I devote myself to the garden, to the fence, to the birds, I wish it was already December, this waiting is devastan
[1]All quotations that follow were taken from a handwritten diary kept in the artist’s archive.
[2]A. Gilardino, Piccolo ritratto d’artista, exhibition catalog Auditorium Santa Chiara, Vercelli, February 18-March 12, 1989, p.s.n.
[3]M. Corgnati, in Gastone Cecconello anthological exhibition 1953-1990, Catalogue of the Exhibition, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna, November 17-December 14, Gallarate, Adriano Parise Editore, Colognola ai Colli (Vr), p.s.n.
[4]A. Gilardino, The eye, the mind, the world, Exhibition catalog, Museum of Modern Art, Gazoldo degli Ippoliti (Mantua), November 9 – 30, Adriano Parise, Colognola ai Colli (Vr), p. s. n.