Corrado Fergnani Biography
Corrado Fergnani followed his father, a career soldier, with his family at a very young age, who was transferred to different regions for reasons of service. He stayed for a long time in Emilia and Tuscany where he began to have his first contacts with drawing and painting. He studied at the Brera Academy and at the Sforzesco Castle with Aligi Sassu and frequented the group of twentieth-century painters and the Lombard Impressionists. He worked assiduously on figures and landscapes but later dedicated himself to illustrating publications and finally to advertising for a large Milanese company, but without forgetting painting and exhibiting in group exhibitions. In 1970 he dedicated himself completely to painting, following the example of the twentieth century painters (Salietti, De Grada), of the clarists (Semeghini), and of other artists from whom he drew inspiration (Vellani, Marchi, Frisia). extraordinary lagoon landscape of Venice and that of the villages of the Ligurian Riviera, capturing their lyrical light and profound chromatic emotions. His landscapes arise from an instantaneous visual perception: an effect of light or color that suddenly animates a horizon, a lagoon, a beach, a clearing visited by silence; but it can be a veil of domes that seems to dissolve in the air, or a pure chromatic relationship, between sky and sea united in specular correspondence. Around this primary source, sometimes eccentric, nomadic, located at the edges of the canvas, the plot of the pictorial work is articulated, in a very exact definition of the various sections of light and the transitions of tone. Fergnani organized the material with skilful perspective solutions and by going deeper he shaded and attenuated the color, to the point of suggesting remote presences with barely hinted touches. Landscapes, views, images of nature, all played on a few essential subjects: Venice and the islands, towns and glimpses of the Ligurian coast, motifs modulated on the register of imperceptible internal variations and the sensitivity makes each image a new emotion, intimate poetry of a landscape where an immense love for nature transpires. His painting remains a high testimony of a school, of an extremely rare pictorial art.
