Giovanni Bosco

Italy, 1948–2009

In his cramped room, Giovanni Bosco spent hours painting on pieces of cardboard a graphic universe of rare power, composed of parts of the human body, such as the heart, an arm, a leg, the lungs, sometimes accompanied by bone and muscle structure. They occasionally have inscriptions in which the author mentions, among other things, his identity, his year of birth, that of his father, as well as the names of Italian cities or Sicilian villages. He painted the walls of his room, and then the figures that emerge from his brush assume bigger dimensions, sometimes reaching the human scale. Giovanni Bosco marked his passage through the streets of Castelmezzano del Golfo, where he lived, with oil paintings on the walls of the town, thus appropriating the public space and escaping the deprivations and wretched conditions in which he lived.