Ligama was born in Caltagirone in 1986 and studied in Catania where his artistic career began.Student of the Academy of Fine Arts, he soon became Assistant to the Chair of Engraving which he left in 2015 to devote himself exclusively to painting after having obtained several awards and prizes. After years of research on printing techniques, he continued his artistic journey by investigating the pixels as elements that make up the virtual image. He painted his composition and dissolution mechanisms while in 2015 made his debut with the solo exhibition 8Bit Un mondo a pixel in Bologna later presented in Vodnjan (Croatia). In his investigation the pixels are the atoms of a new telematic and inconsistent matter, they are the pigments of a divisionist painting, the cells that welcome the sound-color frequencies analyzed by him and converted through a cocreation process with an algorithm of artificial intelligence.
His painting practice soon evolved in studio and public spaces; in 2016 he created his first public works between Catania, Palermo and Rome. He took part in the Emergency Festival of Giardini Naxos, the Amt Project in Catania and created a permanent work inside Palazzo della Cultura in Catania. He also painted three altarpieces in the Church of the Crucifix in Caltagirone. The following years saw him dedicated to large-scale interventions. The first one at the Palacongressi of Agrigento, then at the Farm Cultural Park and in Trapani, where he painted on the entire surface of an imposing eco-monster seized from the mafia. In 2019 he took part in Abstracta (Palazzo Trigona Noto, Edieuropa Gallery Rome), an exhibition that brings together the most important Street Artists of the Italian panorama. Matera, Capital of European Culture Foundation, commissioned him to do public work in the city in 2019. He was also among the artists of Countless Cities, the Biennial of the Cities curated by Farm Cultural Park. In 2019 he was also invited by the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow for the Artika Festival and the Macro (Museum of Contemporary Art Rome) for a residence in the Macro Asilo project. In 2020 he is in the Festiwall line up for the Bitume Platform in Ragusa and in 2021 called by the Capital of Culture Foundation for a public work in Parma.
His best-known work is UL which manipulates the Sicilian rural landscape by transferring new information on the ruins: audio recordings reworked in colors that result in unpublished combinations dictated by the palette provided by the algorithm. The pixels become mobile and macro and the colors find balance with the territory that belongs to them, forcing travelers to stop and look at the landscape. This work is a sort of artistic meditation for Ligama who, after arriving at the essence of the virtual image, restarts from the origins of our figurative culture. Since 2019 colors coexist with classical figures that, like ruins, suddenly appear in his work. This series start with Noblesse Oblige project and it develops in Sikanie and it characterizes his current private and public production, in Italy and abroad.
