Luciana Cicogna (Venice, 1949)
From a young age, she cultivated an artistic vocation that would mature in her father’s environment, a well-known figure as a decorator and restorer. Here, she learned the artistic techniques of Venetian lacquer and copied floral typologies from 18th-century painting, while experimenting with more autonomous and personal forms of expression.
She pursued artistic studies, first at the Art Institute and then at the Academy, graduating in 1970 with Giuseppe Santomaso.
Her artistic journey began with a fantastical stylization and simplification of naturalistic elements through an expressiveness based primarily on pure chromatic values. She began to frequent the artistic environment, coming into contact with the group of exponents of Venetian Spatialism and in particular with Mario De Luigi, who would serve her in the future to deepen the accents of her abstract language.
Towards the mid-1980s, her painting denoted a free development of vast chromatic frequencies, punctuated by more airy and splendid scores, symbolically referable to the realm of earth and sky. These are purely imaginative “landscapes”: they are invented forms, but they come from introspective explorations within the natural world.
She initiated a process of formal simplification through the symbolic absoluteness of the figure of the tree in its graphic enunciation pervaded by gold material. The theme of the “OROALBERO” (Gold Tree) is the most comprehensive sign of an idea of the incorruptibility of nature and the need to restore its original usefulness as a total value of life. Moreover, in this operation, the artist draws on suggestions that recall her historical roots, to the most deeply rooted family tradition of her memory, a culture handed down to preserve the Byzantine heritage of Venice, which became congenial motifs for the creative inspiration of the works of this moment.
From 2012, this symbology of nature is identified with the exhibition of materials: wood, bark, used both as explicit references to the natural world and as further formal resolutions.
