Biografie

12-16-1950

He is born in Palermo in a working-class neighbourhood between the four walls of his home.

Eight days later his birth was registered. On documents his official birthday is December 24th.

1951-54

He and his mother live in a rented room just few meters from a railway line. One night, startled

awake by passing train, he´s shocked to discover he´s alone. He spends a great deal of time

in the countryside with his maternal grandparents. His mother moves to a city in Nothern Italy.

1955-58

He remains in Palermo, entrusted to an old married couple named Maria and Giuseppe (Joseph),

a fact he considers anything but chance, like the false birth date. He attends the first three years

of elementary school in a public school. He joins a small band of ragamuffins. During religious

processions, they build rudimentary altars, sell "little saints", cards with the effigies of Saints.

He spends his summers in the Carcilupo countryside. Fascinated by threshers and the grain

harvests that overflow many surrounding rooms and silos.

1958-59

His father decides to handle his education personally from this point forward. Reluctantly, Maria

and Giuseppe put him on the train that will take him to Milan, away from them. He is enrolled in

a religious institute run by Barnabiti fathers in Vigevano. He speaks little more than dialect.

After three long, unhappy months, he is enrolled in a different religious intitute - the Rosmini

Bolongaro di Stresa, located on Lake Maggiore - following the advice of friends of his father´s

who live in a nearby town and would later become a second adoptive family.

1959-60

He spends winter and the following month in a Kinderheim in Gressoney Saint Jean, in Val

d´Aosta. He prepares for his fifth-year exams with a private tutor. He falls in love with the

18-year-old daughter of the director of the institute. He witnesses, and sometimes participates

in, acts of cruelty. Other times he´s the victim of said acts.

1960-61

He studies in Zug, Switzerland, in a private institute. He spends his vacations in a summer camp

in Germany´s Black Forest.

1961-62

The second consecutive year in Zug. Kept back in Latin, he spends the summer alone in a hotel

on Elba Island. He fails the subsequent make-up exam.

1962-63

He attends middle school in Lodi, at the Salesian religious institut.

1963-64

For the first time, he lives with his father in Milan. Enrolled in a public school, he is expelled

for insubordination after just a few months. Beginning in January he moves to Germany,

on the Tegersee, where he studies German. He wears sealskin jackets and takes mountain walks.

In the spring, he spends several months in the south of France in a girl´s school, the only male

aside from the teachers, studying French.

1964-65

He returns to Zug.

1967-68

At semester`s end he is sent away and never readmitted. These are tumultuous, indecipherable

years. Indiscriminate drug use. Reading Nietsche moves him. In September he runs away

to Istambul. He plans or dreams of working, armed and dangerous, selling stolen Ford Transits

between Turkey and Afghanistan. He`s not up to the task.

1968-69

He tries to recover lost time by taking the last two years of high school in a single year.

In January, after two months of daily fevers, he learns he`s sick with tuberculosis. He stays

in the pulmonary illness wing at the Univerity of Pvia hospital through June. He comes out fat

and bloated, unrecognizable. Despite this, he takes his exams. He fails. His father supports him

via amphetamines.

1969-70

He moves to his mother`s city, into a small apartment near hers. Once again he attemps to pass

two years of high school in one fell swoop. In December he abandons school and moves to Rome.

He works as a film assistant. In March he decides to travel to Palermo to visit his old "parents".

They still live on the same street, thought in a different building. Maria still keeps his toys,

and proudly displays them as tokens of her love. They walk together around the neighbourhood

on foot, so that everyone will see them, will know that he`s returned. The first photographic

self-portraits with a self-timer. He sees a picture of the face of the girl he`ll marry in a book

for the first time.

1970-71

In Palermo, as a private student, he finally earns his high school diploma. During a break between

exams a disturbing fact - the ingestion of a massive dose of some not-well-identified drug -

affects him deeply, and the consequence will be felt further on. Maria and Giuseppe die just

a few months from another. The only witnesses to a fundamental part of his life disappear.

1971-74

He`s hired as a postal worker on a limited contract. Following a violent fight with his father over

a woman, he leaves for Munich and then Berchtesgarden. Here he teaches Italian and find work

as a hotel waiter. Returning to Milan, he learns of the tragedy that has struck the owners, whose

only daughter was massacred by her husband in a fit of passion, along with their little girls.

He would refer to this episode thirty years later in a novella. He meets and marries B. in Positano.

He returns to studying philosophy. He reads Pasolini, fascinated first and foremost by the

polemicist.

1975-97

Divorce. He studies and translate Wittgenstein. Despite encouraging results, he despairs

of becoming a "philosopher". He lacks, he claims, a dicursive intelligence. He leaves the

university. He takes on occasional work, translations, in the perennial search of a "vocation".

1980-84

He works as a night doorman in a small downtown hotel. He starts painting. During a nighttime

raid the police arrest six clients, and he too is taken to the police station. He starts painting

fulltime. He meets C. He has his first solo show.

1985-90

He becomes convinced, over these years, that painting is not the expressive means best-suited

to his personality. He experiments. He becomes separated from C., interrupting a relationship that

had lasted for ten years. He meets V. He doesn`t find success as an artist, but his production now

includes characteristics tha will prove permanent, and which he can unreservedly consider his

own. The phrase "Mi piace, Non mi piace" (I like it, I don`t like it) appears in spring of 1990 and

decrees his independence from every form external judgement.

1992

His second solo show. The first embroideries: minimal, impersonal phrases.

1993-94

His third solo show. Discouraged by the apparents uselessness of his effords, he seriously

considers moving somewhere else. His father dies. He travels in Africa, then to New York, for

the first time. He`s surprised to discover that people don`t shoot one another from car windows,

as a certain cinematographic mythology maintains.

1995-97

He spends three years as a commuter in NY. He works intensely, at the same time collecting

a long series of disappointments in his contacts with the art world. He marries V. in Manhattan,

one splendid April morning. He`s too isolated.

1997-99

He moves to London. His work difficulties are permanent, and apparently irresolvable. N. is born

on December 20th, 1999. His attempts to join the artistic community prove a failure.

2001

New change of address. From London to Monte Grande, in the mountains, on Lake Como.

2003

The gallery owner he started with offers him a second chance. He produced editions of artworks

that date back to more than ten years earlier and which were never exhibited.

2005-06

His exhibitions now progress with a certain regularity. He writes and published Dopo Lenz (After

Lenz), presenting it in Milan as one of the artworks in his show.

He starts filming his first videos. He presents his Trilogy in Berlin. He elaborates a form

of "public writing" inside the Modena train station. He`s invited to the Locarno film festival

to participate in Play forward".

2007

He has lived fulltime in Berlin since September.