Giovanni Picco (b. 1996) is a visual artist based in Milan. In 2024, he graduated in Painting and Visual Arts from NABA in Milan.
He recently participated in Capriccio (2026), an artist residency at the Canonica di San Salvatore in Barzanò (LC). He contributed to the exhibition programme of MAD – Magadino Art Department in Magadino, Locarno, between 2022 and 2024, and participated in the group exhibition Se non vieni alla mia festa non siamo più amici! at Artilaide Studio in Gallarate (VA).
Giovanni Picco developed his practice through independent publishing, cultivating a particular interest in comics and self-publishing that ultimately led to his current research. Through conlanging – the creation of an artificial language with its own phonology, grammar and vocabulary – Picco brings together his interest in linguistic research and the construction of alternative universes.
The artist has developed a personal language that he calls Guali Mangio. As this language is unknown to its audience, the work can only be approached through a necessarily imprecise process of approximation: each viewer is free to identify their own points of reference and thresholds of access.
Giovanni Picco’s works take the form of large-scale textile installations in which his language is constructed through processes of assemblage and patchwork. Forms and words accumulate in layers, creating an open system in which meaning emerges only through the work’s relationship with its audience. This idea draws on a pataphysical approach, in which exception and invention are not deviations from reality but alternative ways of constructing it.
Drawing on a concept developed by Umberto Eco, the work embodies the idea of the open work: a space of possibility in which the viewer participates in ‘acts of conscious freedom’ and is placed ‘at the active centre of an inexhaustible network of relations, among which they establish their own form, without being constrained by a necessity that prescribes the definitive organisation of the work as experienced’.
The work Tovaglia Basaglia draws inspiration from the photobook Per non dimenticare. 1968. La realtà manicomiale di Morire di classe, edited by Franca Ongaro Basaglia, with photographs by Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin. The tablecloth – an everyday object associated with domestic, familial and convivial life – is removed from its customary position and transferred to the vertical space of the exhibition. Through this transformative gesture, the object is freed from its original function, taking on the form of a banner and becoming a public symbol of resistance and memory.
Here, too, the work retains its characteristic tension between untranslatability and the direct comprehension of information. This duality, which recurs throughout Giovanni Picco’s work, does not constitute an obstacle but instead becomes a means of participation. The meaning of the work is not presented in a definitive form; it requires an act of engagement, negotiation and position-taking.
Text by Milena Zanetti