Biography

Claudio Schifano was born in Syracuse in 1953,

He is a amongst painter and has a long and eminent artistic career. His native town, amid the most beautiful in the Mediterranean, is a place where you can breathe and admire art at every street corner. An open museum where the sea is the frame of this amazing land which has seen the most important Mediterranean civilizations. This Mediterranean atmosphere is often seized in the artist’s work, instantaneous and it stuns during the first approach with the work.

Since he was a child, Claudio loved hanging about and searching among the archaeological finds that his father and uncle restored; he was intrigued by his brother that was making his first steps towards painting and himself was very charmed by it.
After graduating at the Art School of Syracuse, he begun his artistic path; in 1973 he performed his first exhibition and from that moment he carried out many collective and personal exhibitions. He has achieved numerous rewards and artistic acknowledgements.

Being a very active painter, he has produced many works; in his paintings he portrays his land in a fairy-tale setting. Those who look at his paintings have the impression of flipping through a book of fairy-tales, charmed by it for its poetic narration, its shapes and bright colours“Page after page” you are conveyed and involved in the world as seen by Claudio.
The brushstrokes and the strong tonal clashes seem to conspire in sucking the soul of the user that lets himself be wrapped by this magic and at the same time real world.

About me

Raimondo Raimondi.

Contemporary artist, Schifano detaches from naturalism and from exteriority, to abstract himself and to address to the interests of deep emotions. His paintings are characterized by the spontaneity of the paint-brush, by the cleaning of color and imagination of the forms. The painting process is enriched by the density of matter which the artist clots, surrounds and extends all the enjoyable details of his compositions.
An explosion of shapes and colors that shows the rigorous preparation paint  and a fantastic free inspiration, following the naturalness of his character and the limits of its ability, of which the artist is fully aware, using pure color, amalgamating it and creating compositions that make sense of a universal beauty from the deep and inexhaustible roots.
Schifano is the chorister  of the oneiric unconscious  in the chromatic living forces that meet the canvas and can be expanded as a magma. Under the pressure of the brush are created evocative landscape and abstract compositions in which it loses, as in a field of poppies suddenly invaded by the colors of spring.

Luigi Matrone.
The history of Claudio Schifano as an artist starts in 1973, when he was just 20 years old,
With his participation to the first exhibition of “Raduno di Arte e Folklore in Ortigia” organized by the Teatro Giovanile (Youth theatre) of Cesare Politi.
Since his first paintings his artistic interest has always been addressed to the informal art and he passes on the message thanks to a language based on shapes and mainly colour. He portrays objects without respecting shapes and colours, drawing only on his view and imagination. Colours and shapes live together pleasantly moved by a gentle breeze that makes them bright and shiny, rousing gaiety and happiness. The joyful chasing of lights and shadows enters the heart of the viewer who cannot escape from gazing at the charm of Claudio’s works. The warm shaded brushstrokes that lay down on the painting are rich of chromatic intensity, they speak of the world that surrounds him with a spontaneous poetic plot.
The starting point of his interpretation is the appeal of the land where he lives and works, the main source of his artistic inspiration, through which we can catch a glimpse of the Mediterranean character due to his Sicilian origins.
The use in his works of Oilbar colours and collage made of papers and other material applied on canvas, creates unique effects that exalt the creative expression of the master and underline a remarkable artistic path.
The reputation of Claudio Schifano as an artist is now well established beyond the boundaries of Syracuse, and he is appreciated by a vast audience of fans.

Antonio Maddaluno.

The painting by Claudio Schifano is a vortex that enveloping and energetically leads  to a world where reality disintegrates and the dream is expressed in all its most imaginative chromaticity. The canvas becomes a container of emotions, from which they are overflowing with passion to hit the look and fit in the soul. The workmanship in mixing the colors and waving into fancy shapes, naturalness and authenticity of the brushstrokes, the hypnotic rhythm in which alternate lights and shadows, makes Schifano, the painter of instinct, of the unconscious, of the thoughts translated into vivid matter.

Claudia Dal Santo.

I look at Claudio Schifano’s paintings and spontaneously I find myself smiling.
I gaze from one to another of these precious fragments that have seized the light returning it to colours, like tesserae of a great mosaic.
I am fascinated by gazing upon these amazing worlds and I realize that each one of them seems to reveal a small secret, something that is personal to the artist, that is called passion, joy, generosity, intensity.
In Claudio’s painting, colours are able to express these feelings with such a pathos that anyone can feel their presence.
All that is to appreciate and applaud the artist who is able to pass on the contents of the mind thanks to his pictorial flair.

Carmen Verde.
Bright, deep colours giving out sounds, smells, emotions and making air vibrate with joyful and vivid memories of white, sunbatbed bouses, boats on the shore, sails swollen by the wind, luxuriant and thorny bushes motionless in the deafening buzz of summer landscape, the cracklings of dly each colour stands for a deep feeling, true and longlasting in the painter’s mind.
Red, orange and yellow are similar to tbe summer sun heating the heart or to the burning lava of the volcano, or else to the blinding ligh daringly comong out of the painter’s soul when he is caught in his creative attitude towards life.Green and blue are like the freshness of sea water at dawn, a lash, a cold rattle caused by a breath of the mind struck by a thought or by an old memory; they are also like a clear sky in a windy day when horizon is Vague, or like the severe clearness of a deeply lived feeling.Then the dark blue, deep and mellow, like the calm and silent sea at night, the rest of an old man, the silence of a glance, the cahn after a day of songs and games spent on awhitebeach; or else like the serenity of the quiet expression of the artist, an actual evidence in the clear lines that make regular or changing the images he himself creates.Strong feelings and emotions, ahnost violent, in contrast with the gentleness of a warm and frank glance.

Pasquale Bova.
Claudio Schifano’s painting brings us back to our childhood, when we observed in astonishment and wonder the coloured figures made by a kaleidoscope.Fígures and landscapes with their abstractionism and theír forms, sometimes chaotic sometimes regular provoke impulses and a desire for freedom in the observer in Claudio Schifano’s works colours and forms live together pleasingly moved by a breeze that makes them dynamic, bright and shining.
It is not easy to escape the fascination of his colours and spaces.
Claudio Schifano’s art urges us to recinsíder mediterranean nature and landscapes and to recall feelings and emotions once belonging to us and now buried by a world more and more locked into a virtual universe.
Perhaps taht is why his works arouse curiosity and astonishment without referring to any hidden mearling.