Marco Castagnetto was born near Turin, in 1976.
Very young, he falls in love with painting and music, both arts that he’ll deal with during his school years, even when attending the philosophy course at the University of Turin.
After having studied and applied classical painting and drawing techniques as oils, watercolours, pencils and deepening in the while his interest in philosophy and religion, Marco Castagnetto specializes in digital painting and creative design, and his artistic training evolves melting a deep pop art fascination, underground counter cultures, and a tendency toward digital realism.
So the first works were born, a balanced harmony of traditional drawing, digital treatment and poster art.
In 2008 Castagnetto attends the International School of Comics in Turin, looking for faster and more communicative creative methods, and here he can deepen an interest in writing that he already experienced in the past, applying to script-writing for comics.
The meeting with sequential art changes again his approach to artistic production, and he starts working on a huge collection of art posters to experiment and to enhance the value of an easier contemporary communication focused on art serialism, a copyleft point of view close to the last two decades artistic counter cultures.
Marco Castagnetto identity has a shameless, absolute digital imprint: a tie locking the artist to new productive dynamics and to their consequential isolation, and to work setting as a shaping factor for contemporary personality.
Nevertheless, his works never completely avoid the vacuum left by previous artistic instances: they rather integrate traditions into an identity able to interpret, by acting on a controlled serialism, different and even antithetic conceptions, re-shaping them into a mass-media drunkenness.
In the meanwhile he seriously starts writing comics scripts, leaving the penciler roles to external artists, and focusing on narrative creativity.
Spirituality, cyberpunk, introspection and analysis, mutation and the new flesh are all themes populating Castagnetto narrative scenarios, giving bodies and brains to a kaleidoscopic whole made up of eclectic characters and situations. The same urgency for a meta-language that we can find in music, his mirror side.
The constant background of his artistic developing is in fact T/M/K, an experimental musical outfit created in 1991: with this brand, Castagnetto releases nine albums, various international collaborations, soundtracks and sound installations, interpreting in music his identity.
Once again, mutation is the angle stone of his investigation: by nullifying the traditional song structure, his tracks describe the anxiety of new information melting sampling, digital jazz and irony. To continuously look for communication. Marco Castagnetto had various exhibitions in Italy, and he’s currently working on Daily Flesh, a collection of 12 works about human body ethical and physical fragility. Daily Flesh will be released through the artistic international collective Pornsaints he recently joined, a group that’s bringing into art galleries a more intellectual approach to alternative porn. |
