Giuseppe Livio

After attending Artistic High School he enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy in Catania, where he graduated in sculpture in 1998. Working in these years alongside Antonio Brancato, his teacher, led to artistic collaboration for the realization of an important bronze monument for San Giovanni La Punta, on Etna.

Livio speaks of those years as a rich period of stimulating artistic promptings, particularly as regards the acquisition of a different engraving technique and of the ancient art of printing. In that period he had precious encounters with different artists including Gianbecchina, Salvatore Incorpora, Sebastiano Milluzzo and Elio Romano.

In 1994 he opened his studio-thinking place in Catania, in which he did sculptures, paintings and copperplates. Ravished by the strength of material, he accepted various commissions that led him to do sculptures in wood and terracotta. He participated in numerous collective and personal exhibitions.

In the years between 1990 and 1997 he matured his idea of painting seen as an absolutely private thing but with public and shared results, a form of exhibited intimacy, strongly feeling the need to go beyond the composure of academic formalism to work with a sign that was free and stained with expressionist forms, which well recount his artistic pathway in that period and lead to a series of symbolic portraits in which the strength of the sign and the vigour of colour do not admit conciliatory compromises towards surrounding society.

1997 was an important year: his work trip to Saltsburg allowed him to hone his sculptural restoration techniques and at the same time to acquire knowledge of new cultures, steeped in the colours of landscapes and the smells of unique materials, which stimulated his innate curiosity towards everything that is new and significant, and this experience was translated into a big series of works.

1999 was a gloomy period for a person that, like him, is used to denying the rigor of rules and the imprisonment of confines. It was the year of his obligatory military service, in which being deprived of the freedom to use his time as he chose led to the enormous production of a series of faces constantly marked by sadness and by being treated arrogantly.

In 2001 attainment of the qualification for teaching Drawing and History of Art took him to Istanbul. His stay in the great city that is the “gateway to the east”, together with numerous trips to Cappadocia and other places in Turkey, took him into contradictory and very different situations. The allusion to Istanbul is evident in the expressionist works of that period, in which the sign narration takes on a value of lay “mysticism”, one conforming to the amazement of the gaze of the western man regarding rites, ritual, colours and smells belonging to a new culture. In opposition to the noise of the metropolis, Cappadocia, with its silence and isolation from time, prompts an almost monochrome result with the dusty and earthy shades in so many works of his.

From 2002 he settled in Italy again, and until 2005 taught History of Art at various high schools in Lombardy, meanwhile going on with painting activity on a wealth of themes concerning contemporary events.

From 2006 he taught History of Art in Catania and Rome.

From 2008, through the encounter with Giuseppe and Antonio Vitale he became the protagonist of intense exhibition activity, with important personal exhibitions. Among them we can remember the ones at the Ciminiere Modern Art Gallery in Catania, in the crypt of the Old Cathedral in Milazzo Castle, at the former prison of Lipari Castle, at the San Benedetto and Santa Chiara Monastery at Licodia Eubea and at the SPAZIOVITALEin Gallery in Catania.

We can also remember significant participation in artistic-cultural events like “The Night of Culture” on Salina or the first edition of “The Black Sails” on Lipari.

He was also appointed as the artistic coordinator for a sculpture section of the project “The Gateway of Beauty” by Librino in Catania and the artistic coordinator for a painting section regarding the “Great Mother” project for the Polyclinic in Catania. He participated with a big copperplate engraving work of his on a single scene of printed representation on sixteen sheets of paper, done by hand, entitled “Disclosing the perfumes of his image” in the “Rite of light” commissioned by Antonio Presti for the city of Catania.

In June 2014 a personal exhibition of his was organized, curated by Francesco Lucifora, at the Palace of Culture of the city of Catania. It was very successful with the public and was applauded by numerous specialists. Also significant in the narration of the exhibition was the presentation of works realized with dry copperplate technique on paper, done by hand.

In October of the same year he was present at Art Market Budapest, while in December with a big installation of his, entitled “Strong Note”, he was a protagonist of the 2014 “Rite of light.”

In this period there were numerous contacts with some galleries in Paris with which he began some collaborations. That of Giuseppe Livio is tormented and frenetic art, certainly not indifferent to the noise of life, and not only his own life. However, from the end of 2011, in painting he had a period of sweetness and introspection, which had never been so intensely present. This is his cycle of “Lightness.” It is a memorable overview of humanity, a metaphoric chorus of the feelings of man at every latitude and in every time.

His works are present in important public and private collections, and among them we can remember, from 2016, his insertion in the Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art at the Regional Gallery in Palazzo Bellomo in Syracuse in the spaces of “Sant’Agostino Contemporanea – SAC.”

Today he lives partly in Catania and partly on the island of Vulcano, where he cultivates his passion for art, doing paintings and sculptures in which the characteristics of our time are reflected.

Curiosity and experimentation are his untiring fellow-travellers.