CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY
We can perhaps say that all his life, Gastone Cecconello has been looking ahead in order to make sure he can see far behind. This is not a play on words, but a way of being, a philosophy of life, his own criterion for putting into practice the teachings that nature and that peasant world, to which he always felt he belonged, continually imparted. “Basically, my life has always been an attempt to keep my feet on the ground, but my eyes have always been turned toward the firmament,” he would write in his autobiography. [Read excerpt]
– Lorella Giudici, editor of the monograph “To the Origins of Myth,” 2013
Gastone Cecconello’s work is analyzed by steps, cycles, by groups of works, in the opposite directions, even backwards. He succeeds in being diachronic with respect to his own work: this is his consistent extemporaneity, when he also does not mix abstraction and figuration, contrasting his own modes, relying on the many winds that press on his sails pushing out to sea or directing him to various ports. But, consciously, deliberately, all this takes place in the sea of art and its millennial history. Say otherwise, to what other certainties should today’s artist entrust the navigation in existence, if not to the conscious one of constant doubt. [Read more]
– Renzo Margonari, 2004
Properly Cecconello’s motto should be Heraclitus’ saying: everything is renewed. In his inexhaustible curiosity, all the techniques of painting, ever since man has felt the need to give expression to his unfathomable mystery; all the coloring pigments, all the media, and not content, inserting into the pictorial structure the most heterogeneous, most foreign elements, which miraculously fit into that new foreign context as if they were born there. [Read more]
– Maurizio Corgnati, 1991
(…) we will find again, in the vehement timeless projection of Cecconelli’s landscape, inobliable fears that, in the somewhat grim light of a sky, in the tense profile of a zoomorphic hill, in the arcane darkness of a forest, in the chaotic luxuriance of unseeded and untilled crops by man, in the fury of a hurricane or in the avampoos of wild flowers, hold, perhaps unconsciously, the spirit of a legendary narrative-Celtic spirit before Piedmontese-the remote rumblings of geological events that have formed the structures of the regions in which we live, the codes of a retinal relationship with the visible world, which cannot but be specifically and uniquely “ours.” [Read more]
– Angelo Gilardino, 1990
Cecconello’s language is identified with his research, with an elaboration that unfolds according to a calm relaxation of compositional volumes, with a taste for matter that acquires the value of an infinite intuition or light or, again, of an underlying irony. [Read more]
– Angelo Mistrangelo, 1991
Pensive about man’s destiny, Gastone Cecconello has on several occasions also turned his participating attention to the existential condition, finding in it a plurality of stimulations of his own actions. Contrary to too many expressions of the art of our time connected to this kind of motivation – which mostly mummify within the limits of a frigid sociological report – Cecconello pursues the path of symbolic discourse with results of remarkable poignancy. [Read more]
– Carlo Munari, 1991
It must be agreed that this expressive fury, this explosion of colors, this light that invests the fabric of the painting, belongs to his desire to convey sensations emerging from distant sedimentations of thought, to translate everyday reality into an intense representation intensely felt as a signal of an existential vitality that is diluted on the canvas with unusual emotional tension.
– Angelo Mistrangelo, 1990
Gastone Cecconello fixes numbers on the faces of people who think they have a physiognomy of their own (the “tax portraits”). He is one who levels noses, eyes and mouths to human simulacra convinced they have individuality (his humanoid figures). He is one who enshrines pluralities, “masses” of people reduced to emblem-symbols of their own actual nullified social weight. Nullified because such masses are uncritical, devoid of autonomy of thought, rendered passive by the daily violence of a totalitarian and intrusive mercantile pseudo-philosophy. [Read more]
– Mariano Pieroni, 1985
Among this myriad of signs, of dreams, of enlightened transpositions, in the effervescent whirlwind of subjects that appear and wane to the artistic attention of our author, one stands out as a symbol, a beacon, a synthesis of his ideal message: it is the stylized image of the man of his time, of our tragic and solemn time; the misguided man, almost jolted from his slow progress in the path of History, caught in the grip of a civilization that sacrifices everything to the becoming of matter and technology. [Read more]
– Mario Pistono, 1990
Cecconello is an artist who does not shy away from the world; on the contrary, he confronts it in all its aspects with an ironic candor and a fundamentally playful attitude. He does not attempt to replace the reality of history and the news with a fiction, but opens up, in his art, a representational process that relocates the real world, revealing it in a different light, in an even more real world. One might say that ordinary reality is in his eyes a deck of cards with which one can invent an infinity of other games and raise audacious constructions. [Read more]
– Angelo Gilardino, 2003
Another character of his personality is represented by his simultaneous, that is, alternating recourse to the different expressions of painting and sculpture in ways that preserve common linguistic elements, often absorbed together because they are produced by the same impulse. I do not believe that his has ever been an operation to be circumscribed in the purely formal plane. The rigor of form never seems to me to have excluded the emotional element, because Gastone Cecconello succeeded in subjecting the latter to an action of control and verification. [Read more]
– Salvatore Maugeri, 1991
Raising his cry of protest very high, Cecconello does not intend to disassociate himself from the social reality in which he lives; in his works the drama rises to poetic levels that impose themselves among the dross of materialism, albeit lowered into a reality that defuses all ambition and systematically disarms the ambition for beauty; from this profound contrast takes shape a heartfelt appeal to those who can still give a rudder stroke, a healthy steering to the madness of the world’s affairs, such as to allow its continuation. [Read more]
– Mario Pistono, 1980