URBIS  –  preface by Sandra benvenuti

With a nearly irrational impulse, Donaggio cuts out the details that form his visual story resembling a tailor working on an eccentric dress. Through this spontaneous, almost mechanical act, the
author nourishes his incessant experimentation. The instinctive cutting outs – rough clippings – selected by the artist give the subject a new air: let us consider – for example – the cyclist with his face covered, riding through sinister smoke stacks along an urban route with elegant solemnity; or the queues of people resembling replicants while forming a human roped party for the protection of a Duomo which is being restored.
To create this work the artist has chosen the density of discordant colours – the ones that he defines: a yell of colors – thus emphasizing the sensation of the noise of an overcrowded space by employing shapes that are sometimes messy.
Milan is the city where Donaggio has lived much of his time and where he has grown intellectually.
It is an effervescent, stimulating town where energy forges you. Yet, besides all this buzz, as the daily din fades out and you come back home, solitude awaits you behind the corner.
Urbis by Donaggio is exactly that. The descriptive objective of the project is that of recounting – using images – the daily life stories happening in the big city highlighting human desires or frailties, and feelings often hidden between colored nightmares and plays of shapes conjoining in bizarre and fascinating aesthetical synergies.
The author strolls around the city with his camera and collects – like a harvester – details of every kind; he loves differentiating things, breaking them into pieces, separating all the elements that form the city and then re-compose them like in a puzzle, but with other meanings. In his projects there is not only one proposition but many others, connecting. The artist’s work lives at the border between photography and other types of art including sculpture, painting and music, always placing itself in a territory which is different.
That of Donaggio is a kind of photography that fools risk, that seeks the unusual and the eccentric. This allows him to cross the image totally and reach intimate, authentic propositions.