victor caniato

Victor Caniato was born in Italy. (1949). When he was eight he left his native country and joined his immigrant parents in France. He was a metal worker when he discovered the works of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi at the Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris. This unexpected but decisive meeting led him to undertake artistic studies.
After the beaux-Arts, he developed a rather figurative art which essentially represents the human, by modeling with clay, faces or emerging bodies. A few years later, the figure gradually disappears, in favor of more stripped-down work. The evocation of humanity then becomes the central subject of his research. Indeed, several upsetting moments in his life, such as his meeting with the inmates of Saint-Joseph prison in Lyon, led him to this process of simplification, to a more refined language.
“I create sculptures with all kinds of materials: cement, plaster, clay, rusty steel. I especially like poor materials, easy to mold, which allow repentance, going back. No marble, no pretty wood, but concrete, old plank. I try to say the maximum of things in this way with the minimum of means, by privileging the subject, by rejecting the beautiful object. This relationship with materials comes from my education, from my working-class origins.
Today my vocabulary is tightened around iconic shapes that are easy to identify: stars, birds, little houses. These representations come from the primitive images, tales and legends that I have carried with me since childhood, in an anarchic, disorderly manner. These self-taught references allow me to extract codes specific to the art of my time. Beyond the pleasure of thinking, imagining, designing and producing, I seek to place my sculptures in a symbolic, universal dimension. Accessible to the greatest number ”.
The figurative elements are placed on plinths which become larger and larger over time. The disproportionate relationship between the base and what it wears accentuates the effect of monumentality because it destabilizes the perception that one can have of everyday space. In his work, he plays with this relation of scale which he very often reinforces by assembling raw materials with precious representations. The base is no longer a support but becomes an integral part of the work, it extends an energy coming from the earth. Base and sculpture mingle intimately. No separation appears.
Currently Victor Caniato is continuing his plastic research and is also devoting himself to the creation of a sculpted garden of 3000m2 where he assembles his works with those of his artist, poet and musicians friends.
"When I look at all of my work I perceive it as a puzzle whose fragments scattered here and there are in fact only the successive episodes of a sculpted book that tells the story of my life. From now on, between my studio and my house, between the earth and the sky, I am putting this book into space in the form of a sculpture garden. A garden to re-enchant the world; the garden of jocelyne and victor ”.

VICTOR CANIATO
1979 Graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Paris Prize for Sculpture.