Giovanni Primo Greco
Giovanni Primo Greco is an Italian contemporary artist currently living and working between Rome and Catania. He studied at the School of the Nude in Catania and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. In the early 1990s, he began his professional painting career while working as an assistant in galleries and cultural associations—experiences that deeply enriched his understanding of art history, curatorial practice, and artistic research. Initially trained in figurative and classical art, Greco developed a strong interest in 16th- and 17th-century painting, closely studying masters such as Caravaggio, Poussin, and the Flemish artists Van Eyck, Brueghel, and Bosch. Over time, his practice evolved toward abstraction and informal art, driven by a desire to explore human nature and reality through gesture, emotion, and materiality. His work is characterized by a psychoanalytic approach to form and color, eliminating traditional depth to emphasize emotional intensity. Lines, signs, and color relationships become his primary means of expression, inspired by urban textures, torn posters, and the traces left by time on surfaces. For Greco, painting is the result of an encounter between man and nature—an empathetic alternation between pure form and complexity—where color functions as language and gesture becomes a direct expression of inner experience.
Solo Exhibition — Between Gesture and Memory
By Sfumato
Giovanni Primo Greco’s work unfolds as a direct encounter between gesture, color, and inner experience. Rooted in classical training yet driven by a need for immediacy, his painting abandons representation in favor of emotional vibration—where form becomes a trace of thought and movement. Greco studied at the School of the Nude in Catania and the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. In the early 1990s, he began his painting career while working within galleries and cultural associations, experiences that deepened his engagement with art history and critical discourse. His early research was shaped by an intense study of 16th- and 17th-century masters such as Caravaggio, Poussin, and the Flemish painters Van Eyck, Brueghel, and Bosch. After an initial figurative phase, Greco turned toward abstraction and informal art, seeking a more immediate reality where gesture and dream coexist with rational structure. His practice centers on a psychoanalysis of form and color, flattening space and emphasizing emotional tension through line, sign, and chromatic relationships. Urban textures—torn posters, weathered walls, and material surfaces—inform his visual language.
Between Gesture and Memory presents painting as an act of freedom and intensity. Color assumes a linguistic role, gesture becomes emotional evidence, and each work stands as the result of an empathetic encounter between man and nature—raw, spontaneous, and deeply human.
