Mimmo Sancineto è nato in Calabria, luogo nel quale ha aperto per la prima volta gli occhi alla luce, ai colori, alla mediterraneità dei paesaggi fatti di montagne e di mare azzurro. La sua carriera è scandita da numerose mostre personali e collettive di pittura e scultura. Sue opere figurano in collezioni pubbliche e private di molte città d’Italia, ma anche in America, Francia e Spagna.

La sua attenzione artistica si è concentrata principalmente sul territorio che lo circonda, il Parco del Pollino dove vive e lavora da sempre, descrivendolo non solo nella sua conformazione paesaggistica ma anche nelle complesse problematiche di inquinamento ambientale.

Negli anni la sua opera tende ad un’ astrazione sempre maggiore, e ciò che inizialmente era una rappresentazione veristica della montagna e dei suoi paesaggi naturali e antropizzati diventa oggi una visione scarnificata dove la luce è la vera protagonista nel suo delineare le forme, enfatizzare le trame materiche e dare alle superfici di pietra e di verde un colore sempre nuovo e cangiante.

foto Cerchiara di Calabria (CS)

English version

Mimmo Sancineto started painting and sculpturing in 1954. He got a diploma at the Art School of Castrovillari and then he attended the Art Academy in Naples, where he taught “the chisel and the repoussage”. At the beginning of the Sixties he constituted the art association: “Le Trou”, together with friends, artists and students, that had their meeting point in his atelier. He was an art teacher at the “Scuola Media” at Castrovillari, where he opened the modern art gallery: “Il Coscile”, in 1969, and where, in 1984, he set up the publishing house with the same name. He has been publishing the magazine: “Apollinea” for ten years: it’s a two-monthly magazine regarding the area of Pollino National Park.

He has been at the head of the cultural group: “Alternativa Sud” for over ten years, supporting and defending the area surrounding  Castrovillari.

He was also the president of the Calabrian Publishers Association.

Now he is a member of CGIL-SPI leadership in Calabria, the president of AUSER in Castrovillari and a freelance journalist.

He took part in a lot of art exhibitions and he often received prizes: ( Avezzano Prize, the Bargello, the Pizzo Calabro, Sybaris Arcal Rai Prize, Fili d’argento at Cassano, Luigi Vanvitelli Prize at Caserta, Ninfa Lusiade Prize at Cerchiara di Calabria, Città di Maruggio Prize, Kiwanis Prize at Nicotera, Culture Prize 2005 from the Prime Minister Office, Umberto Caldora Plaque at Castrovillari, the Silver Plaque 2006 from the President of Italian Republic ).

He was knighted by the President of Italian Republic for artistic merits.

He mounted personal art exhibitions all around Italy. His works are present in a lot of public and private collections, in America, France, Spain and Italy.

Mimmo Sancineto has a strong will to work and fight cultural battles in favour of his country, through any expressive means. So, he worked in local newspapers and art magazines, in radio and television means of communication and, for a long time he has directed radio programmes and given lectures about arts, that were useful for him and especially for Calabria as regards the subjects dealt and the problems raised. He was also on the jury of national and regional art competitions.

Mimmo Sancineto didn’t seek success and achievement out of his country, in richer areas where making money was easier, but he preferred the hard and arduous way of the cultural research in Calabria.

Recently he mounted three personal exhibitions; first in Rome, at Palazzo Venezia, presented in the catalogue by Claudio Strinati, Monuments and Museums Curator in Rome; then at the  “Museo delle Genti d’Abruzzo”, presented by Ivana D’Agostino and dedicated to the assonances between the National Park of Abruzzo and the National Park of Pollino; and, finally, the exhibition entitled: “Magna Graecia and its signs”, at the Archaeological Museum of Sibari: a kind of “tribute” to Calabria and to its history, where past and present, or better still, past and future, considering the techniques and the new pictorial languages used by the artist, meet each other in a kind of explosive mixture of suggestive atmospheres and colours.

We cannot leave out the exhibition at Gallipoli, at Palazzo Balsamo, and at Corigliano Calabro  in the beautiful Swabian Castle. Future exhibitions are going to be mounted in Milan, Venice and London.

The Mediterranean quality of Sancineto’s painting, pointed out by several art critics, is its most important feature together with a peaceful coexistence of typically figurative manners and abstract representations, so that  we may be led to build a new pictorial identity: the “ figurative abstractionism”.