Giovanni Fontana

“Usually in art, the signifier is much more important than meaning. Because in art it is important not what is said, but how it is said.”

Giovanni Fontana

Perfectly in line with the experimentalism that has characterized visual poetry in all its forms, Fontana creates his collages through the assemblage of materials and off-scale images taken from magazines and newspapers. The word, present here in decontextualized fragments, is material with which the artist creates original, intermediary links with other visual elements. Music notations suggest that these artworks can also be read out loud.

Giovanni Fontana (1946), lives and works in Alatri, Italy. Fontana has ventured into visual arts, architecture, theater, literature, and music, but the privileged   territory of his work is that of intermediate writing. In 1963, he held his first personal exhibition of his work illustrating tales of fantasy, experimenting with the many possible connections between literature and the figurative arts. In 1968, he founded the experimental company “Teatro Nuova Dimensione”. His first verbal- visual works date back to the years 1966–1968 and develop alongside the sound experimentations. In the 1970s, he began to collaborate with Adriano Spatola, with whom he published Radio / Dramma, a text that stands between visual poetry, paramusical writing, phonetics, an action score, and artist’s book. He is the author of several visual scriptures, books, records, and videos.