After making concrete sculptures, by 1966 Giovanni Cannata started to use stainless steel. This suggests that he was leaving behind the traditional manual skills, surely related to his Sicilian origins, in favour of technological production. With stainless steel sheets sculpture, the artist makes use of geometric optics by levering the specularity of the material to break the objectual consistency of the works and to let the outer space and the surrounding images being reabsorbed on their surfaces. The art critic Giorgio Di Genova wrote:

“All of Cannata’s body of work, mainly geometrical, opens to new results and to a dialectic of tensions and intensions of formal dynamism, with a lightness that often amazes for its ability of using the simplicity in formal dialectic relations. Cannata focusses on an exasperated attention on the forms and their many possibilities in space. By assonances and dissonances, the stainless steels sheets unite or oppose, mimic or diverge, chase or escape in a continuous interchange of curved, plane, angular, concave and convex trends in a syntactic instability increased by the optic ambiguity generated by the mirrored shine of the material. At first glance, it seems an easy morphologic game, if you forget that it is a very difficult material to control and bend to one’s own intensions like stainless steel. For this reason the formal cleanliness and lightness obtained are important expressive results, even though I think in the semantic level this type of research demands some force that Cannata expressed with concrete in the past.” [translated from Italian]1

According to Di Genova, Cannata captured with steel an unexpected lightness of expression and a greater freedom in articulating forms, freedom otherwise impossible to expect from dull concrete forced to a kind of archaic-rigidity. This transformation from concrete sculptor to artist of refined metal objects is striking and suggests that his research is constantly evolving, considering the openness it presents. Cannata managed to bring together two opposite worlds, according to the art critic Vinicio Saviantoni.

Giovanni Cannata was born in Comiso (Ragusa) in 1937. After graduating at the Art Institute in Venice, he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Roma for two years. In 1970 he taught at the Art Institute of Marino (RM).

Cannata exhibited his works at the Quadriennale in Rome in 1965; among his exhibitions, Galleria Il Fondaco in Messina in 1960 and in 1970; Studio AL2 in Rome in 1969 and Galleria Il Brandale in Savona in 1970.

The artist was a friend of Mirella Bentivoglio, protagonist of the international and Italian word-visual research, who curated with Vinicio Saviantoni the catalogue Giovanni Cannata, Galleria AL2, Rome, 1969-70 (exhibition divided into two sections: “cementi inediti 1963-64, strutture in acciaio dal 1966 ad oggi”).

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1. See the Presentation of Giorgio Di Genova: Giovanni Cannata, Centro Il Brandale, Savona, 2-15 May 1970, excerpt from: Giorgio Di Genova, Storia dell’arte italiana del ‘900 (volume Generazione anni Trenta, Bora, Bologna 2000, pp. 391-392, ill. 669).
Giorgio Di Genova, review Dal cemento all’acciaio, in “Mondo Nuovo”, Rome, 11 January 1970, p. 22.