Please join us from 19-22 this Saturday for the first solo exhibition of Giovanni Ercolino. Bring some friends and come meet the artist and look, sip, shop, and talk. Read his bio to get inspired and to find out more about the artist and his work...
The cornerstone
It is not my intention to talk about myself in the third person, as if to make the accidents and choices of my life into epic episodes: I prefer to tell, in a few lines, how the love for art was the cornerstone on which I built my life path.
I came into the world, without having presented any official request, in May 1983 in San Giovanni Rotondo, a small town in the Gargano. Since my early childhood, to the dismay of my family, I have been interested almost exclusively in art, preferring the pencil to radio-controlled cars, and artists' monographs to superhero comics.
Not having the financial resources to enroll in an expensive private art institute - the only one present on the Gargano - I choose to attend a technical-industrial institute, but only to obtain the necessary diploma with which to attend university, and without ever ceasing to fill my canvases and sheets with colored traces.
At the turn of the 2000s I frequently stayed in Oxford, where I had the opportunity to paint and sell my works thanks to the mediation of a local poet I met purely by chance.
At a certain point, I decided to change scenery and chose to live in Florence, to attend the local fine arts academy. But, despite the numerous positive comments received from teachers and colleagues, I did not pass the entrance exam and, therefore, I enrolled in the three-year degree course in history and protection of artistic heritage at the faculty of literature and philosophy, also in Florence.
“Anyway”, I thought, “the topic is fundamental for me and it will be an opportunity to learn the lessons of the great masters in an in-depth and structured way. Then I'll put them into practice, develop them and make them mine, in my room as a university student": that's how it was - and I've never stopped - even though I've changed rooms many times.
I have never had exhibitions, I have never collaborated with art galleries, I have never promoted my art but I spent the first 37 years of my life just studying, experimenting, making mistakes, correcting, changing ideas and working on my paintings, without stopping: because my art comes first; I dedicate the necessary time to the remaining daily activities. I have – in short – to paint and study.
Over the years I have experimented, in a constant and omnivorous manner, with different techniques and approaches towards painting, remaining, even when I mention abstraction, always anchored to figurative representation and always keeping social justice and the human condition at the center of my themes, in its many forms and variations.
Despite these years spent painting exclusively within the walls of my home - and entrusting the circulation of my works only to chance or word of mouth - several of my works can be found in private collections in Tuscany, Lombardy and England.
For about three years I have been making the enormous effort to publish some of my works on the much-hated social networks and, in October 2020, I inaugurated my atelier in Florence, immediately animated by several emerging local artists such as painters, sculptors, graphic designers , photographers and writers: fertile, constructive relationships and comparisons, which are further expanding my sources of inspiration.
“I have to paint. Then I care much less about the rest.”
What I do
Today I work mainly on untreated wood, a support that I appreciate very much for its raw and material nature, through an initial brush application of oil colours. Subsequently, I intervene on the pictorial surface with spatulas, knives, saws, sticks and a sometimes nervous method that serves to represent the roughest, most uncomfortable and abrupt reality.
These themes and this technique are present in all the paintings included in this catalog and presented in the chapters “Defeat - Defeat”, “Pictorial plates”, “Portraits”, “Investigated shadows” and “Dynamic graphite” and which express, if seen as a unicum, a stage animated by infinite figures in constant struggle, aware of the difficulties and their own weaknesses, but determined and confident in affirming their dignity. |
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