giovanni bosco
dottore di tutto #3
We are devoting a third solo exhibition to Giovanni Bosco (1948–2009), an emblematic figure of Sicilian Art Brut. A dozen previously unseen works reveal the artist’s striking visual vocabulary—hearts, robots, blades—created by a former shepherd who, in the face of adversity, became one of the most singular artists of his generation.
Born in 1948, the Sicilian artist Giovanni Bosco—first a shepherd, then a worker in a marble quarry—descended into psychosis following the murder of his brothers by the Mafia. Neither psychiatric institutionalisation nor the year he spent in prison could take away his disarming smile or his propensity to transform his impoverished existence into an act of pure poetry.
In Castellammare del Golfo, near Palermo, his days were subsequently punctuated by Neapolitan folk songs and by paintings of extraordinary inventiveness, which he executed on the walls of his town or on whatever makeshift materials he could find. Just as his genius was finally beginning to be recognised, he died of cancer in 2009.
What strikes one at first in this body of work is that it seems indebted to no particular influence, effectively eluding any facile comparison. “Bosco was permeated by visual thought,” writes Eva Di Stefano, suggesting that the complexity and originality of his work find their sole source in the inextricable workings of his psyche.
His compositions, suffused with red and meticulously orchestrated; his formal non sequiturs; his hybrid homunculi; his muscular avatars; his votive limbs; his shifts from glyph to organic form, and back again, ultimately trace out the alphabet of a secret, intimate language. It is almost as though we were witnessing a graphic soliloquy of the utmost intensity. Giovanni Bosco, a melancholic dottore di tutto—as he called himself—overwhelmed by every possible misfortune, found in art an absolute remedy.
The days of the Sicilian Giovanni Bosco were marked by popular Neapolitan songs and paintings of rare inventiveness that he performed on the walls of his city or on makeshift materials: dismembered or “overmembered” bodies, serpentes shapes and homunculus, cephalic hearts, words and signs punctuating the drawing’s interval. A colorist of the Sicilian streets, the artist is now part of prestigious collections, including those of Antoine de Galbert, abcd/Bruno Decharme (France), and Treger-Saint Silvestre (Portugal).