At the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice, until November 24th inside the national pavilion of Cameroon, you will be able to admire and interact with the work of Cesare Catania, The Hug Phy Versiona sculpture that is both physical and digital.
“I decided to bring the sculpture of the Embrace closer to the digital world to give everyone the opportunity to live a unique experience. When you find yourself in front of a sculpture Phygital you know what you see but you don’t yet know what you expect… By framing the sculpture, the visitor can completely immerse himself in the artistic world of the work of art. Hence the idea of creating not only an immersive reality linked to the work itself but also an artistic space that gives anyone the opportunity to literally play with the art they are experiencing, to create their own sculpture following their own tastes and own feelings. Art is not only observed, not only felt… art is lived”. These are the words of Cesare Catania in presenting the work.
But let’s get to know the artist better. Born in Milan in 1979, his violinist grandfather passed on to him his passion for music, which is very close to his other passion, mathematics. In fact, Catania loves to define itself engineer by training and artist by passionbut he is also a profound connoisseur of everything that falls within the digital universe and fine arts.
He has a strong ability to break down and shape the solids that surround him, and this is found in his paintings, and in his sculptures capable of expressing reality and feelings with the elegant and harmonious combination of solid and curvilinear figures.
Catania tries to establish a communication channel between his unconscious and that of the spectator, arousing emotions that tap into the deepest sphere of the human soul, in a dreamlike dimension of fantasy and freedom, finally freed from the needs and limits of figurative representation. He is an artist who carries out a type of research in which form and matter are the undisputed protagonists of his creativity.
Fascinated by modern art, architecture, and the pictorial masters of the classical age, Cesare Catania’s art is constantly evolving, always looking for new techniques to best express his inspirations.
In his sculptural works, the artist expresses a dynamism, also typical of Italian futurism, through the synthesis of reality and the harmonious use of both rounded and non-rounded solids, redefining man in his centrality with respect to the world around him, using the sphere and the geoid as a balancing element of the forms.
In the work exhibited at Venice the bodies, in fact, blend together, the figures represented have their heads bowed with their gaze turned upwards, almost as if the characters wanted to highlight their pride in the gesture they are making. It is therefore a conscious abandonment of one individual in the other. The sculpture is composed of a curvilinear rod that summarizes the slender and thread-like movement of two bodies that join, an elliptical ring that represents the joining of the arms of the two characters, two geoids that allude to the heads and three spheres that harmonize shapes and movements . Seven geometric elements that alone form a sculpture, a project and a message.
Precisely that of the embrace, the strength of this work lies above all in the message it transmits. A project in which the artist strongly wanted to affirm that art was no longer the ultimate goal to strive for, but the means through which to do good in an ethical way.
Catania is in fact a convinced supporter of democratic art, in the sense that art must be accessible to and with everyone “The Embrace”, Collective Versionhas developed a software, where every art lover can create his own unique version ofHug, not only using public domain images as a background, but also personalizing every single part of the sculpture and sharing it in HD, thus creating a “Single version” co-signed with the artist. So art becomes a way to combat universal extraneousness, the theme of this 2024 Biennial.
