Ghostville Painting

Giancarlo Montuschi was born at Faenza (Ravenna) in 1952. He lives in southern Tuscany and is a painter, ceramist and sculptor. His artistic training takes place in Bologna, where he attended and graduated from the Art School. At the age of just twenty he held his first one-man show at the Galleria Sire of Faenza. With his works produced in the mid Seventies he inaugurated a post-Pop language, influenced by the changes wrought in Italian figurative expression by the Pop Art of the Sixties. 1980 was a year that marked a turning-point and a profound change in Montuschi’s poetics and communication. In this time his naïve, fairy-tale and substantially imaginative language is enriched with alchemical-esoteric veins, launching a phase of work centred essentially on alchemy understood as a philosophic process and one of material change. The work of Giancarlo Montuschi transports the viewer to a world of dreams and excitement, in wich the importance of simplicity is underlined. Pure vivacious colors and the beauty of nature and human and intimate relationships prevail. In Montuschi's worlds, we can cure all with love. In frontal collision with the world of Disney and Comics, Montuschi creates a new and original pop expression. Giancarlo Montuschi developed a progressive interest in ceramic sculpture, which along with painting came to play a central role in his various artistic creations. He has participated in many art exhibitions in Italy, Sweden, Croatia and China. He has been reviewed by several art magazines. “…His creatures are involved in a yearning that animates the space…he collocates visual references in an imaginary landscape because the artist is also interested in the inner changing of soul and emotions. In this way he renders the places and the profiles with a unique and magical style, depicting them with a special wondrous stroke, narrating with love, portraying with rich and accentuated colors, almost fantasty-like but always harmonious…” (from “The research of existence”, critical text by Maria Pia Cappello from the catalogue of a solo show at the Galleria Tartaglia in Rome).