Giuseppe Donati, aka Pillino, was born in Camogli, Italy, in 1948 where he spent childhood and adolescence. In his hometown Pillino had the opportunity to get in touch with painting in a completely natural way, almost by osmosis, and he initially developed his painting style in the wake of the tradition realizing landscapes, portraits, views. The break with these canonic genres, which the artist describes as violent, took place in 1985 when, especially thanks to many travels and experiences abroad, Pillinomet other artists and realities starting an intensive and continuous research work.
From that moment Pillino starts to look in a different way at subjects familiar to him. He was especially attracted by the traces of memory in the walls of the houses of Camogli. The wall sums up the history of man, in its cracks you can read drama, emotions that the plaster absorbs like a sponge. He decides to make the wall the formal and conceptual core of his works, the starting point and the center of his artistic research.
He rebuilds the wall bearing, a wall-like effect, which is no longer a background and becomes the main subject. Thus, complete cycles are created: “memory scraps”, “pages of walls”, “beyond the wall” and now “water wall”, a wall made of sea water. The artist is turning his research to this direction, both for the passion and the charm the sea. Like walls, represents memory, on eager, at times generous, receptacle of our well-known and secret stories.
Pillino exhibited in a personal show at Art Gallery Zanini Arte in 2014, “Unlimited Bound”.
