The large cedar tree, solitary protagonist of the painting, loses its structural identity to become an emanation of natural energy, the expression of vital becoming, an active and unquenchable primeval force.
Cedar
Luigi Doni
Palaia (PI), 21 December 1947
Luigi Doni began painting in 1971 after meeting Antonio Bueno. His friendships with Bernardo Luino, Alberto Sughi, and Gianfranco Ferroni completed his formation as an artist. In his early works, presented in 1975 at Il Ponte gallery in Florence, he showed open-air scenes in which nature towered over helpless man, alternating with interiors of semi-abandoned houses, empty rooms featuring unusual objects.
In 1982 he exhibited at the Nuova Strozzina in the show Unusual and Decadent Images of Painting; the following year he was invited to Arte Fiera in Bologna and Fierarte in Messina. Throughout the 1980s he participated in numerous shows, to critical acclaim. Doni uses soft colours to evoke orderly, quiet domestic interiors echoing the paintings of Dutch and Scandinavian artists.
During the 1990s Doni concentrated on human faces; since the end of that decade he has been interested in nature, more and more present in his work to the point of becoming the main subject. Thanks to a personal technique he developed, the landscapes are evoked by mixing actual underbrush material with paint and applying this to his support – canvas or wood panel – to represent woods and mountains.
After the Galleria Melotti in Ferrara mounted a major review of his work alongside a retrospective of the art of Antonio Bueno in 2005, in 2007 Vittorio Sgarbi included him in the show “Italian Art 1968-2007” in Milan, followed by many other solo exhibitions.
