Daniele is a native to Ferrara, Italy where he studied at the liceo scientifico and then went on to complete a degree in Architecture and Urban Environmental Planning. Cestari insists that one must understand his work, first and foremost, as that of ‘an architect who paints’. Having never undertaken any formal art training, Cestari renders onto the canvas his architectural passions – his fascination with the energy of the urban environment. His carefully crafted perspectives invite the viewer into the all-consuming momentum of the cityscape, alive with texture. The dynamism of Cestari’s loose brushstrokes and blurred canvases evoke the city as a living entity, constantly in flux. Yet they also lend his scenes a wonderful sense of opacity; keeping the observer at arm’s length, they are the perfect acknowledgment of the impersonal nature of the metropolis, with its hidden away existences and shuttered private lives. Cestari uses various mediums together – oils, pencils, acrylic and varnishes – to create a work as varied as the city itself. Often he begins his work with less than pristine canvases – old, degraded, stitched and imbued with their own history – and he works to unite these pre-existing traces into his work. For Cestari, we are the paintbrushes and pencils within our own cities, each footstep down a street adding to the history of traces left before.
