[t.a.]Domenico Cantatore was born in Ruvo di Puglia on 16 March 1906.
He lived and studied alone since early youth. Having emigrated to Rome, at the age of eighteen he moved to Milan.
It was a very tough one. But already in 1930 his first personal exhibition at the Milan gallery reveals an artist of high quality creative, attentive to the translation of that reality that will remain then, throughout his work, the dominant issue, again to rediscover the original nell'inesauribile painting.
Becomes a friend of Carlo Carrà, and in those years especially difficult for young artists, will create deep ties with a group of peers, Raffaele Carrieri, Alfonso Gatto, Salvatore Quasimodo, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Fiorenzo Tournament, Arturo Tofanelli, Sergio Solmi, Cesare Zavattini , and several other poets and painters with which divides misery and hope.
Cantatore in 1932 went to Paris for the unexpected help of a friend.
Also here are renewed experiences of deprivation and suffering are common to young artists, who gladly pay that price to see the Impressionists, Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse.
Of that time remain in a notebook some beautiful drawings, some puntasecca, works in which the artist shows that he has refined his summary to the linear purity dell'arabesco.
He returned to Milan after two years of residence in Paris, he exhibited at the gallery of Milione drawings made in Paris. Participate in Bergamo prizes at the Venice Biennial with salt walls and personal with four of Rome; exhibited by Barbaroux, gallery Genoa, and the announcement in the most important art galleries. Numerous awards, the works in Italian and foreign museums and private collections in the major.
In 1940 he was appointed Professor of Painting at the Accademia di Brera. Shortly before the war, writes almost as a game, but also need to gain some small, some short stories for The Ambrosiano, an old Milanese newspaper of those years. They are the same writers that his friends encouraged him to stop on paper the memories that narrated a voice during the long night walks: memories of childhood spent mostly in the South
There are the characters, countries, those faces of the earth and light that you find in his paintings after 1954, when he returned to the truth of which no experience, no illusion or solicitation later was able to diminish. South Cantatore will become a thing carved, a painting without aphorisms, hard and true as the tuff, swollen areas burned, hub, as roots of the hands, and vast skies, a light and boundless polychrome which will fill the landscape .
Some large public exhibitions of his work were held in Ruvo di Puglia, 1965; Palazzo Flangini Biglia, Sacile, 1966, at the Museo Civico di Monza, 1967, at the Rotonda di via Besana, Milan, 1976.
He died in Paris in 1998.
Cantatore was one of the greatest masters of contemporary art, one of the most clear and meaningful to the "middle generation" that after the twentieth century, was the point of transition from one climate to another of the Italian artistic life, and is still committed, in terms of style and poetry, to deepen the meaning, value, consistency of contemporary expression.