Giovanni Federico

Giovanni Federico is an artist notable for the sculptural depth he achieves with paint as well as his venerable approach to the human psyche. His works of oil and mixed media on wood have a lyrical style in the spirit of European Expressionism. Darkly emotional, whimsical and painterly, Federico’s poignant landscapes hatched in thick layers of oil evoke a sense of social decay, solitude, vulnerability, sensuality and imagination. Woeful, evanescent figures elide with the glistening urban terrain of a Dionysian underworld in which the fruits of melancholia and alienation are manifest. His carefully composed characters, with their intriguingly elongated bodies, contribute to an atmosphere which brings to mind questions of eroticism and melancholy, life and death, unity and singularity. Says Tanino Bonifacio of the work, “The bodies narrated in Federico’s paintings become honey ointments, healthy potions that help you live despite the presence of the ‘tragic,’ despite the banality of gestures and words.”

Giovanni Federico, sculptor, painter and filmmaker, was born 1973 in Petralia Sottana, a small Sicilian village.