Gianni Dessi

Gianni Dessi was born in Rome in 1955.

The thought, work, and composition seen in Dessì’s painting is rooted in the abstract painting of the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century. But his world is based on more ancient, even archaic foundations, pushing his objectives towards the extreme limits of painting itself.

Besides the imprints we find faces, eggs, eyes, mouths and also geometric shapes drawn directly on the canvas with the tube of paint, metal tiles and wires, stretched cardboard incorporated into the canvas. There is nothing casual about the wide variety of materials used by Dessì: the knotted metal wire draws in space the plaiting of the painted surface onto which it is anchored.

The “prism” protruding from one of his latest paintings creates a tension with the frontality of the picture and obliges the viewer to move nearer to it, to change his point of view and to discover the extreme complexity of the forms he is seeing.
Often his pictures do not fini3sh with the rectangle of the canvas but continue over onto the walls, as though to underline their wish to continue their process of transformation into “another” space, one outside the limits of the canvas. The artist transfers into his work the various experiences in scenography.

In fact, in the spring 2002, Dessì was commissioned to design the scenery for Wagner’s Parsifal represented during the Salzburg Easter festival, a production which was conducted by Claudio Abbado and directed by Peter Stein. The performance then travelled to Edinburgh.

The one-man exhibition at the MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Rome between February and May 2006 confirms his central rule in the Italian painting from the ’80s, and documents his recent interest for plastic researches turned to a natural vision of the humane figure.

The recent works realized in fiberglas confirm, moreover, a research turned to unusual materials and to a particular idea of the pictorial surface conceived as a transparent medium also developed in its possible plastic values.

 In 2009 he exhibited at the Mart museum in Rovereto.