Giovanni Dell'acqua Biography
Giovanni Dell'Acqua was born in 1952 to a farmer father and a housewife mother. As a child, he had an aversion to school and his teachers advised his parents to enroll him in the Professional School for Electricians in the hope that he would learn at least one trade. Precisely those studies influenced him so much that even today we find geometric and material constructions in his works. I personally met Dell'Acqua in 1974 at his first exhibition at the “Il Subbio” gallery in Matera and I still remember the visitors' shock when faced with the works that stood out for their originality of content and creativity. Very communicative and skilled in symbolic speculation, the artist, in dialogue, demonstrated great theoretical ability and maximum attention to the structure of contemporary art and supported absolute autonomy of decision regarding form, color and connection with reality . It was evident, even then, that he was endowed with an imaginative Pathos, whose intuitions embraced the world in a vision of cosmic unity. The works exhibited in that exhibition, as if by magic, emanated maximum vitality like products of the sun soaked in water, since the shapes represented on the canvas were not homogeneous, but each part had a specific space and its own time. They also wanted to be symbols of rebellion against a certain figurative culture prevailing in Italy at the time. At the same time they represented the first nucleus of thought, which builds the image under the stimulus of forces that act in the painter's soul in the very act of expressing himself - music and architecture were the most evident -. The moving shock mass produced energy in the complexity of the signs, giving rise to a new conception of space which expanded in the artist's thought like a sound wave to reach a theology of colour, a metaphysics of abstraction, within a harmonious and cosmic order. Those works, perhaps, responded to the emotions of childhood and youth, such as the construction of an electrical diagram.
