This exhibition allows you to see unpublished works by GIANDANTE.X created between 1918 and 1963. Most of the drawings, paintings and sculptures come from private collectors who over time had the opportunity to meet the Master directly between 1947 and 1984, the year of his demise. At the end of the 1940s GIANDANTE.X wanted to leave his artistic testament to a few friends, consisting of works collected here for the first time.
Like few others, the figure of this artist - who crosses the architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, politics of the twentieth century - escapes easy categorizations and definitive interpretations. Certainly, the artist always tried to make himself uncatchable, he tenaciously strove to be forgotten, to disappear from the world despite having lived a full, difficult, adventurous existence: a fighter's life.
GIANDANTE.X is the pseudonym of Dante Pescò, from Milan, born in 1899 (he changed his name around the age of twenty, at the time of his artistic debuts, with a deliberate typo in place of "Viandante", where the added X stands for cancellation and anonymity). He was born into a family of textile industrialists from the Lombard upper middle class. Student prodigy but outside the box, self-taught, nonconformist, he reads a lot, awfully: his father will come to cut off the electricity in his room to cure him of this "vice".
On 1 October 1916 he ran away from home never to return. He has a strong passion for Girolamo Savonarola, Arnaldo da Brescia, Robespierre, all rebels and revolutionaries, great protagonists of history but also deeply isolated and solitary in their absolute radicalism.
After graduating in architecture, as a student of Edoardo Collamarini (in 1921 he graduated in philosophy) he began to make himself known in Milanese and national artistic circles by exhibiting in 1920 in an exhibition promoted by Adolfo Wildt, who said about him: "...the artist Giandante, virgin of all academicism, tests himself for the first time in public scrutiny. They are small pieces of mosaic which he will later use to execute the complete work...". Inside the exhibition dedicated here to GIANDANTE.X, it is possible to see some small black ink on tissue paper from 1919-1920 influenced by Wildt, who was precisely his teacher: they are small jewels, extremely refined miniatures. The Study of a figure in Indian ink and pencil on paper appears curious: a profile of a man erroneously defined as the Head of Mussolini, within the Franco Maria Ricci Collection.
He also developed important friendships, from Carlo Carrà to Mario Sironi, but he never followed his infatuation with fascism, nor did he ever place his art at the service of the regime. In 1928 Sironi wrote about the work of GIANDANTE.X: "...in his plasticity we have rediscovered his decorative taste in large masses and vast simplicity of planes. It is a hieratic and archaic decorativeness of a warrior and a contemplative taste...".