Giovanni Blanco. Everything that happens

Catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition Giovanni Blanco. Everything that happens, curated by Galleria Susanna Occhipinti, San Vincenzo Ferreri Auditorium, Ragusa, 3 September – 17 September 2023.

The twenty works on display are a selection of unpublished paintings and monotypes that narrate a round trip: that of the artist himself who, after studying at the art institute, as well as Sicily, he crossed part of Italy to continue studying in Bologna, where he remained for twenty years, however, recognizing the unique variegation of his island and the inevitable contradictions that derive from it as the cradle of many of the archetypes that to this day constitute his pictorial imagery and which we find within the exhibition.

“Painting as a place”, therefore, the inexhaustible and complex theme of Sicily, visions, speech, feelings, holes in memories and pure seductive marginalities are the ingredients of art, for Blanco in constant movement. “For a painter, the variety of the world is a destiny, a blessing, an infinite visual vocabulary from which he can draw liberally: I discovered that at least three quarters of the entries in that vocabulary are found in Sicily. Everything that happens is the partial narration of an initial assessment of my return to Sicily: every painted image is an attempt to short-circuit this river of words”, says Blanco.