| Domingo Notaro was born in 1939 in Calabria's Palermiti area. It wasn't long before he began to realize he looked at the world from a unique perspective. For example, he tells the story of how he overcame his fear of the dark when he was a child. He used to go out at night with burning embers and draw in the air, tracing signs that at once dissolved into nothing. He discovered in this what he calls ?the instant where eternity is.? A few fleeting events blended with his perspective and left an indelible mark on the mind of the child and gave rise to the long journey that Notaro calls ?the solitude of understanding; the as yet unknown cipher of my existence.?
In 1949 Notaro left for Argentina with a distant relative, and five years later, at the age of 15, he was on to Buenos Aires for schooling. Tormented by doubts regarding the discrepancies between free will and dogma, he secretly studied the Bible, highlighting its contradictions and jotting them down in the margins. He attended various schools of painting, sculpture, literature and music and began selling his pieces to support himself.
In 1958, at the age of 19, he opened his first personal exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and after traveling all over South America, began tracing his steps back to his roots, an endeavor that took him back to Italy. He settled for a while in Florence, following a short stay in Genoa and Turin and a very brief period at Palermiti. During this time he investigated surfaces and carried out experiments on materials, inventing "chinacidi" (solutions of Indian inks and acids), which allowed him to obtain explosive, throbbing and suggestive chromatic effects in his features.
To avoid subjecting himself to the torments of the arts market, he sought employment of all kinds. However, aware of the fraud whereby contemporary society barters progress for civilization, he developed an idea he called "fusion,? between procreative naturalness and creative unnaturalness, between the useful and the useless, which he proposes in his art. ?Humanity is constantly moving towards unnaturalness. Art is not necessary, it is indispensable.? Essentially, despite his will to escape, he soon understood art was his calling.
In 1962 he painted a portrait of Pablo Picasso without having met him. This piece would eventually become part of the Picasso collection. In 1963, his first personal exhibition in Rome stirred great interest and spirited polemic discussion within the spheres of art and culture. The establishment immediately played down the importance of his work, though not actually attempting to disregard it totally.
In 1965, at the Quantas Gallery in Rome, David Alfaros Siqueiros, fascinated by his painting, asked Notaro to collaborate on a 350-square-meter fresco to be produced in Mexico, and later in New York his works were shown alongside those of Chagall, Dufy, Lèger, Modigliani and Picasso. Notaro was later the guest of Pablo Picasso at Notre Dame de Vie, where he also had the opportunity to meet Albert Skirà. Picasso was profoundly impressed by the 23 paintings Notaro showed him and expressed a desire to have one of them. This visit marked the beginning of an important friendship.
Notaro received strong reviews from Louis Aragon, Jean Cassou, Pierre Courthion, Warie Jean and Waldemar George for his two personal exhibitions in Paris in 1967. These critics called Notaro such things as "the messenger of the world's new art? and "a great visionary, a creator of magical forms with monumental style."
The Fitzroy Gallery in Brussels presented his work in an exhibition titled "Sexual Evolution and Revolution" in 1969 and in following year, Montevago, a small Sicilian town tormented by frequent earthquakes, bestowed honorary citizenship on him.
In 1974, Notaro's ?Pluridimension? style was born. The method involves the parallel between micro and macrocosms. The artist begins painting on panels, the centers of which are open, empty quadrangles, mirroring the void outside. The spaces in between teem with human and stellar clusters.
In 1981, Notaro presented his Pluridimension, with Augusto Gentili, Giorgio Gudagni, Carlo Guaraldo, Vittorio LetiMessina, Paola Romano and Patrizia Fulciniti, in a biographical analysis and a combination of his work in a thesis.
In 1984, he released his piece ?Cosmomitomorfosi,? and in 1991 his world-famous work ?Il Limite? (The Limit) was presented. In this groundbreaking piece he worked on ulterior stages in his paintings and assumed the position of a hypothetical observer at the moment immediately after the Big Bang. The model for the piece is therefore no longer humanity or the world or the solar system, nor the cosmos but primordial chaos, the amorphous first seeds of matter's tendency towards meaning. |
