PAINTER AND PHOTOGRAPHER, SELF-TAUGHT - SURREALIST, PAINTER OF THE FANTASTIC DREAM.

This is how Giovanni speaks of himself, in a brief informal interview, with the gaze that is lost on the line of Asola’s hills, in front of the villa 700 where he has his atelier (Treviso).

“I was searching for Surrealism even before I knew it.

When I was 17, I thought a painting was like a book page.

But I didn’t want to write just one page, but several pages in the same picture.

It was the moment of my life in which I tried (or deluded myself) to find inside myself a response to the great themes of life: birth, death, judgment of man on man, religion, the rigidity of life, thought.

Through the representation of the dream, I started to be surrealist, when I still did not know the existence of the movement.

At twenty, while as a conscript, I was locked in a submarine, I accidentally came across the back cover of a weekly, where the painting “Giraffe in flames” by Salvador Dalì was represented.

At that sight I said to myself: “This is what I want to propose in my works, these are the pages of the book that I want to paint”.

Since then I have immersed myself in the knowledge of the history of Surrealist movement and other movements around it:

Dadà, Metaphysics etc ... “

My research has continued for more than fifty years in an attempt to paint/imagine the contrast between life and dream.

Giovanni Gambasin has exhibited in numerous cities, including Rome, Venice, Padua, Treviso, Milan, Messina and Asolo.

Abroad, in Germany: Onil Gallery Bremen, Bellingen Art Group, Mindleim Rathaus, Berlin Gallery (Virtual).

In London at ErotikArt, in Switzerland, Banja Luka, Pocitelj Bosnia, Korcula and other places. 

He participated in more than 320 group exhibitions and painting competitions.

In 2021 he received the Art Award of the Municipality of Canale Monterano and Rome University.

In oil painting uses, in the representation of the dream, the ancient veiling technique, with light and transparent veils, while life is represented with strong and dark shades on rigid geometric structures.

In a period of his artistic history he had also experienced the three-dimensional art of ceramics and the digital photography.

His works always maintain the perfection of the stroke and a fantastic/surreal meditative vein.

The series of drawings presented here mark the return of Gambasin, after a long period of inactivity, to the artistic production of pencil and colored chines miniatures.

Despite the technical differences from the past, In them remains the presence of the dimension of the dream, understood as thinking, and reality in a relationship of opposition and, at the same time, of dialogue.

In their entirety these works, accomplice also their small size, they can all look very similar, but on a closer inspection you can note the particularities that makes each work as unique.