This is
CONO
Born in Naples, shaped by London and Paris, Cono’s art travels the world through abstraction and constant reinvention. His journey reflects a unique blend of cultures, experiences, and collaborations that span painting, sculpture, performance, and installation. Recognized for his independent vision, Cono continues to inspire audiences and collectors across the globe.
Early Years and Formation
John Cono was born in Naples in 1977, but he is English by birth, with strong ties to France. Although he did not complete his studies, his books (the latest, Ora Zero, a best seller for months), art catalogues, and musical collaborations testify to his deep and varied education. His first personal exhibition in Nice (after Naples) in 2008 marked a rebirth for Italian art and a turning point for Cono. During his years in London (1996–2006), even within abstraction, his artistic language always carried a figurative essence. In 2008, with the “NETS” series, he created a new artistic alphabet and was invited to several Biennials, the latest in Rome, still ongoing. He also left his mark at the Venice Biennale and other exhibitions such as Genoa (2011), Ferrara (2013), and Artissima in Bologna, where critics began to recognize him as a true novelty.
Recognition and Collaborations
From 2010 Cono began exhibiting regularly in Europe’s most important art fairs, including Basel, London (Freeze), Madrid, Barcelona, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, and Istanbul. In parallel, he developed numerous collaborations with musicians, writers, and theatres, designing covers, advertising, and choreographies. In 2015 came his first exhibitions in the United States. His symbolic work Spirit of St. Louis, co-created with fellow artists, is permanently displayed at the Aula Magna of the University of St. Louis in America. His works—paintings, sculptures, performances, installations, graphic novels, and photography—are sought after by both public institutions (such as Magi and Alt Museums) and private collectors. Cono experiments freely, yet his creations remain unmistakably unique.
Recognition and Collaborations
From 2010 Cono began exhibiting regularly in Europe’s most important art fairs, including Basel, London (Freeze), Madrid, Barcelona, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, and Istanbul. In parallel, he developed numerous collaborations with musicians, writers, and theatres, designing covers, advertising, and choreographies. In 2015 came his first exhibitions in the United States. His symbolic work Spirit of St. Louis, co-created with fellow artists, is permanently displayed at the Aula Magna of the University of St. Louis in America. His works—paintings, sculptures, performances, installations, graphic novels, and photography—are sought after by both public institutions (such as Magi and Alt Museums) and private collectors. Cono experiments freely, yet his creations remain unmistakably unique.
New Horizons and Legacy
Since 2020 Cono has been active in Beijing, supported by the A.D. of Beijing, which also promoted his book Ora Zero. From these exhibitions arose his first monumental installations, later also realized in Rome and Bacoli. Today, John Cono continues to refuse awards and academic recognition, choosing instead to let his art speak for itself. His work evolves, expands, and inspires, crossing borders and generations, leaving a lasting imprint on contemporary art.
What They Say
About Cono
Over the years, critics, curators, and art writers from around the world have shared their thoughts on John Cono’s work. Here are some of the most meaningful reflections that have accompanied his artistic journey. Following you will find some notice on John Cono work from the best art historians on international level such as Simona Pasquali, Flavio Caroli, Brigitte Camus, Damiano Gedressi, Cristian Iorio, Mario Pepe, Gianni Nappa, Smith, Charlotte Stein Infantellina, Fang Xquand, Giacomo Tropeano, Orler, Celin, Serge Beninca, Ciro Cacciola, Pietro Graus (Graus Edizioni), Elena Riccio, Giancarlo Politi, Vincenzo Trione, Vittorio Del Re, Gilda Valenza, Maestro Lello Petrosino Acanfora, Alessia Magliacane, Corrado Vigilante, Francesca Mariotti, Mary Martin Smith.
As soon as i found out that John is not producing and not exposing any longer, i strongly wanted “Artisting Mending” for our Pechin show. A piece of a broken house wall in Berlin, repaired, patched, rebuild, restructured, brought to new life.
John is leaving us…with a question: can art repair what has been destroyed inside and outside ourselves? Can art repair in order to restart again? Yes, art can repair and can give a new vision and new possibility, if we are the “craftman” who meticulously reconstructs or mends artistically and goes ahead as best as he can.
Fang Xquand
879 District – Pechino
Cono tells about the man without painting him. For the fourth Biennale di Genova, i choosed “CANAP” from the delactization, behind this canvas built with such a fatigue it seems that blood runs…
Doct Mario Pepe
Director of Biennale di Genova
Loched in a micro-installation in the shape of a rectangular parallelepiped, never to leave again the public has nothing left to do but to look at common objects, their own existence from the outside, as if through the lens of an isolation room’s glass. They remain enchanted observing what has been represented inside these “boxes”. Everything develops inside. Cents that follows themselves like so many domino pieces standing, in aninstable equilibrium given by the very thinnest copper to create a geometrically ordered serpentine; balloons inflated with air that seem they shouldn’t deflate anymore; little chairs arranged against all phisic’s laws, put upside down in an empty room under the ceiling, on the walls in perfect surrealist style; and more glass ampoules of all kinds or castles of card, all of them so fragile yet protected by the inviolability of the material. This is how life happens in the boxes; a life in trasparency, a microcosm sealed by diaphanous walls of glass in which there is the certainty of remaining uncontaminated by any form of vice and of the outside. On the contrary, from the outside it is very easy to remain curious spectators of what happens inside amplifying the voyeuristic sense inherent in being, resting one’s hands on the plexiglass and not being able to touch the objects placed inside. The boxes by John Cono are all this, an intent reinforced by the precise choice of titles given by the artist, always ironic and appropriate to the outside, toward that metropolitan network that crushes the common man and that society creator of global engaigment: here are the selected recipients.
Damiano Gedressi -2010
Starting from data of historical conquests that man has been able to achieve in terms of discoveries and new encounters between different culture, John Cono develops a cycle of works that can follow a pictorial thread or an adherence to abstract concepts, but above all a need of our time to know how to produce an universal language, simple, immediate, made of signs and “global” words, a sort of story book for children, where pictures replace spoken words and it is so simple to get the message. In the past 30 years contemporary art has been able to learn from technological models, but flattened on the most ideological/political and on daily news, with excess repetitiveness that are declared by violence, wars, with a common denominator of blood as a unique passkey for art following the dictates of the great international business system.
Cono seeks instead to clasify the reason for the interaction, the profound insights into new attention to all social conquests, in the comunion among peoples that produces progress and new knowledges, he outlines a path through his works that pays attention to the globality of networks and to aspects of human life that must be “boxed”, the minimum abilities of doing as a common cry of safeguarding against a common reason of share art, of poor shared awareness from the masses. A language expressive and full of true life, intensely felt and with the aim of being easily read, pure and dirty at the same time (Taf Art) as the lexical and artistic contamination that they have produced and with great difficulties are perceived as collective goods. A young artist, who without protagonism, experiments a pictorial and artistic language that play with the awareness of having to question the future of humanity, starting from the exciting experience of the “Spirit of St Louis”, to reinteerpret the message.
M. M. Smith
London 31/07 2009 – Freeze
Cono is a visionary, his art, an infinite puzzles to which he adds new pieces. The project is well defined, he arrives at stagesand at each stage he arrives in a “different way”. Painting, paint-sculpture, sculpture, performance, installation, luminous work,using disparate materials: strings, iron, plastic, wood, stone, paper, marble, chalk, moving from small squares 8 cm x 5 cm to monumental works 8 m x 2 m. This is the “classic model” to which he refers.
Flavio Carorli – 2013
In the past years, contemporary art expressed itself trough the multifaced combinations that the media and new technologies have brought to society, but at the same time they have interpreted a wide spread social malaise that is evident in western societies. Many artists have felt the need to express a new sense of belonging and they have exploited the media effect and the crude representation of a world no longer shared, with the aggravation of a creeping nichilism of daily life. A many young emerging artists, John Cono is an instinctively creative, emotionally irrational representation of the distruction that society has known about itself, with an immediate fresh and conceptually expressed work, capable of synthesis that art possesses. Much of his work is dedicated to the city, as a metaphor for an incommunicable unsociability, where messages and thoughts are closed in the net and with the development of the net, society overstructurs itself into a sphere of unhuman silence. The force of Cono’s painting is in the fact of being ephemeral, fleeting, a fallen sense of emptiness, of keeping at bay of emotions the risk of developing a collective depression. His canvas are a metaphorfor the emotional collapse of valu, of retoric advertisement, of a continuos artistic search for shared contents, immidiately recognizable, without accepting the derivative of a sensationalism of manners and customs, of some great artists of recent years. With this young artist you need to manage to capture a constant irony, an aesthetic sense in the search of a painting able to please, for its chromatic and undoubtely capacity to get straightto the spectators’ hearts, as showed by the sellings recdently realized in Naples and London, where he is currently on show with almost 30 works from the “Smove” Galleries. Next March there will be a solo exibition at he Galleria Serio in Naples, he has just exibit in Ercolano at Miglio D’oro Park Hotel, in London and in Naples. Cono’s journey has been able to grasp the collective state of dificulty, international cohabitation and the ultimate production appears at the confines of muddy lands and contests, where the dissection and the line of a world network appears as cord of higher design, where our existence, full of changeability and where the commitment for the artist is in the capacity to propose in a creative form, stimolating, with the force of a creative redemption, a momentaneus part in a sea of uncertainities. The linguistic contemporaneity, the social implication, an intense human eye on the world, an internal poetic sense of redemption, a costant commitment to the beauty, all of this is its internal world, expressed in Cono’s painting, with no filters, going directly to the hearts and consciences, especially to those who do not believe in an experimental future, in the freedom, but are in full conscious criticism.
Charlotte Stein
Berlino Ottobre 2009 -Infantellina
Shocking art, brand power, finance’s magitian, auction houses that prepare multimilliionaire events as esoteric rituals reserved for a few chosen ones.
A codified market similar to that of luxury or fashion, but even more impalpable, where discussion do not focus on beauty, talent, gaze light, invention, but on the capacity to provoke, instomtly excite, strike, amaze. Cono amazes for his contemporaneity, but doesn’t act on istinct or unconscious, his works are reflective, mentally enriching at time magnetic; his concepts are very high: life, death, power, fear. Painting, drawing, sculpture, installations, (micro) artistic invention (the “box”, the “cubes”, the trasparent ones) that of Cono is absolute conceptual art, expressed trough study, fatigue thought, skill. The complexity, the web of his concepts unfold on the surface with simpleand direct gesture, but they have deep and hidden roots in the fast, in the flow of history, but above all and this is surprising in the manual skills of the brain. With his ait, Cono knows where he is going and what interests him, he is not influenced by critics, he doesn’t follow fashion, he looks for his interlocutors in other environments, writers, poet, musicians, chefs, lovers of wine and good food. Cono takes from them with art, he wants to discover, exchange… the flow of ideas gives the new works a new perspective, this continuity changes the distances of the world, brings closer what may seem distant. His research is continuos and fashinating, more and more multifaceted, more and more infinite.
Simona Pasquali – 2012
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A special thanks to Tiziana Cono, Venusia Acerbo, Flavia Maresca, and Salvatore Maresca for their invaluable contribution to the realization of this project.