Montesano Gianmarco

Gianmarco Montesano was born in Turin in 1949. He studied at the Salesian Seminary of Valdocco in Turin, but he did not pursue a ecclesiastical vocation, his stronger artistic and intellectual inclination leading him in the 1970s to Bologna and then Paris, where he met Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard, among others. In the early 1970s, Montesano 's first works were reproductions of Madonnas and other sacred images, souvenirs distributed to the faithful in sanctuaries and during spiritual exercises. Montesano enlarged them and revisited them in a postmodern style, drawing on the beautiful tradition of folk painting but also imbuing them with conceptual and theoretical meaning. Several of his paintings are dedicated to Turin and to the memory of his father, who worked as an "eccentric" in the world of vaudeville. From the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Gianmarco Montesano was included in the so-called Medialism movement, a pictorial revival with a neopop and comics influence, of which he was an absolute pioneer. However, he differs significantly from this movement, because by investigating history and the past , Montesano reinterprets the dramatic and crucial years of Europe's formation throughout the 20th century up until its crisis. Alongside these are also tender images of children, seductive female portraits, vast romantic landscapes, and cinematic cityscapes, which Montesano paints in his unmistakable neorealist, or rather post-realist, style. In 2002, Montesano participated in a group exhibition at the Boxart art gallery in Verona with works related to the theme of the Deadly Sins, which was met with considerable success. Between 2006 and 2007, the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Pietrasanta promoted the exhibition Berlin 1936, curated by Valerio Dehò, in the rooms of the Cloister of Sant'Agostino in Pietrasanta (Lucca).