URBAN LANDSCAPE - ANTONIO CONTE

Born in Minturno in 1952, artist Antonio Conte attended the Art Institute and then continued his artistic studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome under the master Franco Gentilini. He created ten hand-colored etchings of Gabriele D'Annunzio's "La sera Fiesolana," published by "Arte Grafica Lombardi" in Rome; he painted the book covers of poets Massimo Conte and Mario Stefanelli; the cover of the monthly magazine "Agricoltura," sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry; the front and back covers of Mario Rizzi's book, "Rediscovering the Linguistic and Cultural Roots of Minturno"; the cover of Rosa Cannella and Mario Tuccinardi's text, "Minturno in the Second World War"; and the cover of Monsignor Paolo Capobianco's book, "The Seagull of Ventotene." Finally, he painted the cover: "Il diporto nautico in Italia" (Nautical Recreation in Italy), 2003, published by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. The paintings of Pontine painter Antonio Conte combine distinctive features that make him an artist of international stature. The artist's forceful style, recognizable in its dynamism, color, and luminosity, generates highly evocative sensations and transports his thoughts far from everyday reality. A "domineering" protagonist, he pursues his own pictorial research and finds his "liaison" in chromatic phonetics, whereby the final consonant, of a formal nature, is not overtly pronounced, but is placed in a primordial configuration. Thus, in his representation, the master creates an artistic reality rooted in dream, desire, and pictorial enthusiasm. These are paintings of great emotional impact and inner communication, where the artist has succeeded in uniting, with great philosophical alchemy, a real-life poetics with the proactive images of an original, "non-objective" painting style. In these lush compositions, the coloristic sensibility transcends any melodic weakness, achieving a result pervaded by a force of spiritual rebirth that, through meditation and dream, takes on the violence of musical visions, without distorting the impact into forms of suffering. The painter-poet masters all the fundamental elements of artistic practice: form, material, color, and light, and, as in any self-respecting project, he manages to portray his creative streak, in which the sumptuousness of the pictorial substance takes over the entire surface of the canvas. In this context, Antonio Conte proposes his own "discursive" concept of the rationality of the mind's vision, in contrast to the ethical virtues relating to the various occurrences of life. An original image born from the chromatic "word," not a word arising from the comparative figure. In this sense, the abstraction of form is not related to the images presented by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning (who produced prototypes with aggressive methods of throwing or dripping paint onto the canvas: action painting), but is presented with a personal motif, where the curvilinear, formal, and uneven elements spread freely across the canvas, expressing the lyrical sentiments of the protagonist. There is no randomness in the flow of dynamic geometries, but only the expression of a free informal transposition, where acrylic paints, pigments, and matter interlock or are released in a jumble of colors and places of life, in which the idea maintains its radicalized abstraction intact. Art Critic Antonio Sorgente