Agostino Cancogni

Agostino Cancogni was born in Forte dei Marmi (LU) on November 26, 1950. He graduated from the Artistic Lyceum of Carrara and, at the age of 19, entered the Academy of Sculpture, from which he graduated with honors.
He has received numerous awards. His works are currently found in collections in Italy and abroad (Arabia, England, Switzerland, Germany and America).
Endowed with remarkable gifts and a natural talent, Cancogni has been able to cultivate them with passionate studies of anatomy and classical drawing. The artist also devoted himself to sculpture, an ancient and profound love passed on to him by his father, also a sculptor.
Passed through various thematic cycles, from the surreal to a Caravaggio-style naturalism, Cancogni today arrives at those interests of form-light-color dear to the culture of art.The observation of the environmental reality is part of the daily experience in Agostino Cancogni's painting, and it is certain that we can speak of a real form of intimism, when the artist collects himself by cultivating for a long time the his secret emotions that arise from contact with things and shapes that are familiar to him.
The subjects spring from memory, which acts as a filter through superimpositions or reflections in a recovery of the real image meditated however by the memory.This is how his Tuscan landscapes are born, still lifes with dried flowers and other small objects of the domestic surroundings, ancient doors, which bear the wounds of the past but which are animated by a warm light that still gives them the strength to exist.
The painting is always very accurate and maintains a surprising lightness of execution, while a few emerging elements sensitize the calibrated and concluded spaces of the compositions.The landscapes of the soul.
Agostino Cancogni is certainly one of the contemporary artists who have best known how to give one of the most evocative interpretations of the Tuscan landscape, in particular of Versilia, a microcosm that has always been a source of inspiration for many poets and artists, first of all Gabriele D'Annunzio.Images, sounds, feelings of a place well known by Cancogni – born and raised in Forte dei Marmi – which, starting from the deep and meditated observation of the landscape, anoints to recall with delicate lyricism the fields, the flowers, the sea in the “magic circle of memories" between the Apuan Alps and “Mare Nostrum".
And it is precisely in the representation of the sea that Cancogni seems to have reached the zenith of his artistic production. Its marinas evoke memories, melancholies, moods, show the coast of Versilia in the enchantment of a sunny morning or a poignant sunset, recall the delicate scents of the sea, of the Mediterranean scrub, of the piles of shells and broken reeds in the damp sand .
A painter who, starting from the representation of objective reality, comes to express a completely personal vision, summarized in the formal balance of the composition, in the supervised dialectic between drawing and colour, in the ability to mimetic rendering, within a harmonious whole.
As in the painting of the Romantics, the natural landscape and the interior landscape coincide in the tension towards the infinite. Cancogni manages to understand the spirit of nature and recreate it in all its purity, projecting us into the calm and at the same time vibrant depths of the soul.