BIOGRAPHY
“BASICALLY MY LIFE HAS ALWAYS BEEN AN ATTEMPT TO KEEP MY FEET ON THE GROUND, BUT MY EYES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TURNED TO THE FIRMAMENT.”
Gastone Cecconello
All his life Gastone Cecconello has looked forward in order to see far back. It is a way of being, a philosophy of life, an ontological criterion for putting into practice the teachings that nature and that peasant world – to which he always felt he belonged – continuously imparted to him.
All of his work is a relentless struggle between the concreteness of matter-which seduces by its variety, yet originates from an earthly condition-and the purist desire to go back to the simplicity of origins, between the rough beauty of iron, wood, and stone and the disturbing vibrancy of colored pastes, which generously crowd and animate the multiform surfaces on which they rest.
Gastone Cecconello was born on March 2, 1942, in Vercelli. His father, Pasquale, was a man of humble origins, working as a laborer and gifted with great inventiveness: he made his children’s clothes himself, cut their hair, fixed shoes objects and furniture. His mother, Salute Tasso, known as Maria, was a woman with an imposing physique and a popular wit; she looked after the family and did a variety of jobs, even during her many pregnancies. Pasquale and Maria had moved from Veneto to Vercelli in 1927.
Gastone was the fifth of six children. Two years before his birth the family balance was shattered by the sudden death of his older brother, Gastone Primo, who at the age of fourteen was hit by a car. From grief her mother fell into a severe depression and, despite repeated hospitalizations, regained her equilibrium only after the birth of her penultimate child, to whom she would give the same name as her deceased firstborn.
In those years marked by the War and severe economic hardship, in 1947 Gastone also had a serious accident in which he was run over by a car in the very same place where his brother had lost his life seven years earlier. Gastone sustained serious fractures that forced him into the hospital for more than eight months: during that period of infirmity he came across recycled papers, pieces of coal and pencil butts in his hands… and it was from there that an expressive path that would never be interrupted began.
That accident tested him physically and psychologically. For a long time he was accompanied by the fear that he would not make it past the age of fourteen: “I lived in a state of deep consternation convinced that I would not make it past the years that my brother lived. I was terrified every time I had to cross the street and suffered from panic attacks. 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. When I wasn’t drawing I would go to a forest near home 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.”
When he was only twelve years old he painted a significant portrait of his mother Maria and began to make friends with other local amateur painters, with whom he occasionally went to paint en plein air. But what then already distinguished him was his fast and instinctive way of working, a mastery of gesture and technique that, though embryonic, promised great future developments.
Already at that time Cecconello was constantly searching for new materials: from chalk to wild berries from which to make pigments, from charcoal to soot… all kinds of materials exerted an irresistible fascination on him. But most of all he sought bricks, so that he could crush them, dilute them with water and use them as colors.
The little room that in the late 1950s Cecconello made out of the family home on Via Gallardi, in the heart of Vercelli, just a few steps from the cathedral, would gradually become a real cultural club open to his artist, literary and musician friends: “My little studio became a real university that I had created for myself within the walls of my home.”
Angelo Gilardino, a classical guitarist and now an international music historian and composer, was his neighbor back in the day. Gilardino recalls, “I used to go there [to Cecconello’s studio] every night to play practicing while he worked. We often pulled the wee hours 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 the music of the twentieth century, from Debussy to Boulez and, as I could, some modern poetry as well.” . “The person who most marked my human and artistic formation was Angelo Gilardino, for me it was like a real university. A deep friendship was born that after sixty years is still alive,” Cecconello concluded in one of his memoirs.
In 1961 he visited the Thompson Collection on display at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin, where he viewed Picasso’s work for the first time. Picasso’s influence would later lead him to abandon his early artistic models, including Antonello da Messina, Mantegna and Raphael, to take an entirely new path and make himself an interpreter 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 to notice Cecconello’s artistic talent was Enzo Gazzone, then director of the Institute of Fine Arts in Vercelli, who invited him to enroll in the Institute’s courses, offering to pay the tuition himself. But his attendance at first-year classes was sporadic and lasted barely two months: the programs and exercises of the first year included things Cecconello had by then acquired on his own. Failure to graduate, however, would over time become a source of grievance. 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 begin a restless and frenzied personal research effort.
In 1959 the City of Vercelli promoted his first solo exhibition at the Palazzo dei Centori, where subsequent exhibitions in 1961 and 1962 were also hosted. The exhibition intrigued many, including among others the caricaturist and journalist Francesco Leale, who published in the local newspaper “Amico del popolo” a seminal article that put the young artist’s work in a good light.
From that moment between Leale and Cecconello began a mutual acquaintance. Leale invited him to attend meetings of the “Forme Group,” which were held every Thursday evening at the Taverna Tarnuzzer, in Piazza Cavour. Professor Carlo Bosio, Renzo Roncarolo and Francesco Donati were also part of the group.
Some paintings of those years betray a meditation on Guttuso’s work and on the Informal, for example the Self-portrait of 1958 and La Battaglia di galli (1960).
From 1960 to 1961 he was called to military service. Even during this period he does not give up art: he makes portraits of his comrades and paints canvases inspired by the work of Klee, Kandinsky and Picasso.
Meanwhile, Cecconello’s painting arouses the interest of some gallery owners in Vercelli, who organized two of his solo shows: in 1962 at the Viotti Art Gallery and in 1966 at the Spa Commissionaria.
From 1964 Cecconello begins to become familiar with a new artistic technique: photography. It will be a passion he will cultivate intensely until 1969 and then more and more sporadically for a few more years: “At a certain point I stopped photography: I realized I wanted to paint with a camera.”
Thanks to art critic Mario Pistono, in 1972 Cecconello met Adriano Parise, a printer in Verona who had come to Piedmont to visit the National Painting Exhibition in Santhià-the most important in the region at that time-and discover new artists. Pistono, a well-rounded man of culture and a profound connoisseur of local history and traditions, was the deux-ex-machina of the Santhià Prize; his friendship with Cecconello dated back a few years but already had the fraternal character that would always unite the two. Parise’s project was to publish commercial publishing compendia containing reproductions of contemporary works of art. Cecconello was soon included in the collections, and this experience would begin Parise’s substantial contemporary art collection, of which many of Cecconello’s works are part. A few years later Parise founded his own publishing house, which Gastone has always relied on for his publications.
The works of these years bear the marks of a further development of his art: a powerful critique of alienation and prevailing capitalism expressed beginning in 1973 by the Businessmen series, influenced by the stylistic imprint of Francis Bacon.
His love of experimenting with materials led to his discovery of Ytong, a special cement amalgam, which he had been introduced to by his artist friend Adriano Nosengo. With this light, ductile and very versatile material, Cecconello would make almost all his works in the following years and begin to develop his new series of “incasellamenti,” also known as “polymaterici.” Reusing from wooden packaging from the food industry, Cecconello made a series of small cells in which he placed half-length figures molded with Ytong. The parody of the human being, now limited in his freedom and condemned to be identified only by aseptic numerical series, emerges plastically from these serial figurations with an archaic and ritualistic flavor. The thought of being considered 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 the fruit of impersonal and massified coding. Thus were born the “encasements” of the human figure, at first closed like tabernacles and then open like the sections of an archive. Between 1976 and 1977 he arrives at the distinctive cipher of his work.
In 1978, with the Biella exhibition at the “Man and Art” gallery, he finally achieved the breakthrough he deserved. He exhibited about 60 works there, all of the latest generation, gaining great interest from the public and collectors, while important critics and gallery owners began to visit his studio in the province of Biella. This was the beginning of his recognition abroad as well: in October 1985 he exhibited at the State University of Hamburg, the following year in Rotterdam (first at the State 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 he often participated in national and international painting competitions, 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 Exhibitions in Santhià, in 1983 and 1989, respectively.
He also devoted himself to the creation of public works, which in 1980 saw him working on the Monument to the Fallen of the Resistance for the 35th anniversary of the Santhià Massacre, while in 1984 he created his largest work in size, 5 x 2.5 m, which was placed in the council chamber of the town of Gaglianico, a municipality in which he resided from 1978 to 1991.
In the 1980s he approached fresco painting. This experience led to the birth of the group entitled “Consorteria dei figuranti,” also 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 project was born as a result of contacts made with Maurizio Corgnati, the television director who resided in Maglione, a small agricultural town in the province of Turin. Corgnati, who greatly appreciated Cecconello’s work, during one of the convivial dinners in Maglione, between the serious and the facetious stigmatized the anonymous monotony of his village. Cecconello, together with Mario Pistono, proposed that the director intervene on the walls of the peasant houses with frescoes and on-site works. On Sept. 20, 1983, the day of Maglione’s patron saint’s day, Reggiori, Trolese, Follini, Cropelli, Alice, Saltarelli, Pieroni, Picelli, Bellini and Carena, with Cecconello in the lead, set to work to bring to life what would become MACAM, Maglione’s Museum of Contemporary Art Outdoors, in the years that followed. The success would be such that for many more years numerous other artists would create works and installations in the streets of the village.
Cecconello, together with the Consorteria dei Figuranti, continued to create frescoes throughout Piedmont: in 1983 for the town of Piane Sesia and in Villa del Bosco; the following year in Pratrivero and in the hamlet of Mazzucco in Trivero; in Santhià in the Town Hall Square in 1989, in the Painters’ Square in 1997, at the Bono Furniture Factory 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 the first prize “Gaudenzio Ferrari” at the 20th International Contemporary Art Competition in Santhià with a painting entitled “Isola.” In 1984, the first monograph on the artist was published by Adriano Parise Edizioni. It was presented by Mario Pistono, Maurizio Corgnati and Mariano Pieroni. Since 1985, artistic symposia aimed at the creation of graphic folders have been organized at Parise’s house: there Cecconello is a regular guest and meets Daniel Spoerri, Hermann Nisch, Aldo Mondino, Sarenco, Eugenio Miccini, Hadorf, Günter, Costa, Margonari, Nagel and many other protagonists of international art.
In 1986, in the wake of his experience with the Tectores Errantes, he has yet another intuition and founds Bond’Arte. The doyen of Biella painters Celso Tempia used to spend his summers at his ancestral home in Bonda, a hamlet of Mezzana Mortigliengo, in the province of Biella, where Gastone bought a rustic holiday cottage. The hamlet was almost uninhabited and quite neglected, but soon, in the wake of Cecconello and his friend Tempia’s enthusiasm, other owners would also begin to show interest in the idea of revaluing the locality. 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), together they gave life to a veritable open-air museum of modern art, with more than 150 frescoes, and sculptures but also to a center of cultural ferment animated by poets, musicians and composers.
On October 5, 1987, he was awarded the “City of Todi” prize by the citizen Artistic Center of Cultural Activity “New Era.”
In October 1988 the second monograph, exclusively focused on sculptural work, was published, again with Parise Editions.
In 1989, ten years after his first exhibition, Cecconello returned to exhibit at the Santa Chiara Auditorium in Vercelli, with an anthological review that traced the entire itinerary of his production.
In 1991 he moved to Salussola, in the province of Biella, to a new house 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.”
Also from the 1990s is a solo exhibition of his work at the Palazzo della Regione in Turin. Numerous oil canvases are exhibited, extolling the rediscovery of landscape, transfigured into magmatic high-paste compositions. On that occasion he made the acquaintance of philosopher and poet Guido Ceronetti, who complimented the gesturality and generosity of his painting.
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 with The Neverending Story.”
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” .
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. This is the era of the great hybridizations of everything that has studded his creative making: figuration, conceptual art, ready-made, polymathic, divertissement and large paintings.
“I work every day like an obsessive in the hope that the world will come to its senses.”