Cagnani Ivan

I am an Italian physicist born in Faenza, an art city famous for majolica. Since childhood I have always had a strong passion for artistic photography as well as for space and astronomy.
With limited guidance from an expert photographer, I started learning photography at 8 with a Fuji STX-2, a mechanical SLR film camera. Expanding my set over the years with a few lenses and numerous add-on glass filters, I used it for 16 years.

At the same time, I started studying the universe, and I was always mesmerized by what I could see in the sky in the night. Visiting local observatories, attending workshops and using my own telescope at star parties I would be absorbed by an unique sensation of infinity that I will never be able to replicate with art.

I started experimenting with digital transformation and filtering techniques in my late teens. With my printer I then created my first digital works on canvas.
As a university student, using my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 4500, I practised BW and colour portraiture, which I printed at home on photo paper.

The following advent of smartphones allowed me numerous new degrees of artistic freedom and unexplored photographic possibilities. I then embraced the universal language of abstract art, which I had always admired in masters like Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers. Alike classical music, I feel that abstract art can give form and meaning to our deepest emotions and, I dare to say, it can also have therapeutic effects.
In my other life I chose to chase the mystery of nature and its laws with the scientific method, and I always remind myself that digital photography and digital art would never be possible without the relentless work of countless mathematicians and physicists over the centuries. I owe them all the most respect, starting from Galileo Galilei, whose pioneering telescope work I wish to homage with my Planets.

My Planets collection is a photographic analysis of the human mind, it's fundamental thoughts and emotions, through the shapes of nature and the evocative symbolism of geometries and colours. It's a space travel in the inner cosmos we daily explore in our lives.
My Meditation collection is instead my naive and nostalgic tribute to the tradition of figurative art and to the history of modern art.