Arduino Cantafora – Anamnesi

20 February – 29 March 2025

Opening: Thursday 20 February from 18.30

Arduino Cantafora – Anamnesi

curated by Ivan Quaroni

Antonio Colombo presents Anamnesi, a solo show by Arduino Cantàfora curated by Ivan Quaroni. The exhibition, which opens on Thursday 20 February 2025, is a chance to discover the work of an artist who with great originality intertwines the art of drawing and painting with the representation of architecture and memory.

The title of the exhibition, Anamnesi, refers to the concepts of reminiscence and recollection, central to the artist’s pictorial practice. “For me, memory is also anamnesis, a curing remembrance,” Cantàfora says, emphasizing the central role of drawing as a tool of reflection and comprehension of the real.

Besides two large works from the past – La città banale (The Banal City, 1980) and Stanza di Città – Roma (City Room – Rome, 1983), presented respectively at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980 and at the Venice Art Biennale in 1984 – the show features a selection of more recent pieces, created from 2020 to 2025, depicting everyday locations like domestic interiors, building entrances, stairwells and urban corners, transformed into representations that reveal an intense focus on details and the character of spaces. Cantàfora’s painting, in fact, embodies an ability to combine analytical precision and imagination in visual narratives filled by a sense of expectation.

A student and collaborator of Aldo Rossi, Cantàfora has always stood out for the rigor and sensitivity with which he interprets architecture, objects and urban spaces. His artistic research, influenced by the traditions in painting that range from Lombardy in the 1500s and 1600s to Divisionism, from Purism to the Metaphysical, reflects painstaking attention to detail and suspended atmospheres, reminders of Renaissance piazzas and metaphysical compositions.

ARDUINO CANTAFORA was born in Milan in 1945. From a very young age he nurtured a curiosity for organic forms, anatomy and entomology, passions that remained alive throughout his architectural studies. He discovered very early the language of drawing, which became his privileged tool for capturing forms. Cantafora begun his career as a painter by tackling the thorny technical challenge of oil painting, becoming a copyist of Caravaggio. From that moment, the craftmanship and artisanal pleasure of painting would never abandon him.
While studying architecture at Politecnico di Milan, he perfected the pictorial representation of the architecture of historical cities. His interpretations revolve around shadow and light, in a faithfully Caravaggesque inspiration. The skills he matured in these years will be invaluable during his collaboration with architect Aldo Rossi (1973-1978), but they will also influence his future work, dominated by the translation of architecture into painting. Nel 1973, Cantàfora espone alla Triennale di Milano La Città analoga, attualmente di proprietà del Museo del Novecento del capoluogo lombardo. This painting became the manifesto of La Tendenza, an architectural movement that reintegrates elements of 20th-century European Rationalism by emphasizing the history of places as central to projects. In 2012, La Tendenza was the subject of a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Cantafora participated again in the Milan Triennale in 1981 and 1988. He also took part in the Biennale di Architettura in Venice in 1978 and 1980, and in the Biennale d’Arte in 1984. Between 1985 and 1986, he was in Berlin at the invitiation of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). The city inspired him to create a series of paintings that were exhibited at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum in Berlin. Le due grandi tele, Das andere Berlin, 1984 saranno acquisite, nel 2006, dal Museo Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (MNAM) al Centre Georges Pompidou di Parigi. These two paintings are part of the 89 works by Cantafora in the collection of the museum. During the 1990s, Cantafora conceived several set designs for La Scala in Milan and for other prestigious venues such as the Aix-en-Provence Festival. His work as a set designer earned him the second place of the Ubu Prize, Italy’s most important theatre award. Tra il 2022 e il 2023, è invitato a due importanti mostre pubbliche: Architectures impossibles al Musée des Beaux-arts di Nancy e Un tiempo propio al Centre Pompidou di Malaga, dove sono esposte due grandi tele berlinesi della collezione del Centro Pompidou di Parigi.
Arduino Cantàfora è stato professore di architettura all’Università di Venezia (IUAV) dal 1982 al 1986, all’Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (AAM) dal 1998 al 2011 e “visiting professor” alla Yale University nel 1988. In 1989 he was appointed full professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he was chairman of the Department of Visual Representation. He is honorary professor at EPFL since 2011. He is the author of several publications on architecture and education, as well as an autobiographical novel and short stories published by Einaudi. Since 2016 he collaborates with Antonio Colombo’s gallery in Milan, where he exhibited in the show Case Cose Città with Alessandro Mendini, and in 2021 he was part of the group show In the Garden of Eden. A landscape of things with Alessandro Mendini and friends .