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| Carlo’s mother dies when he is two years old. His father, a carpenter, is unable to take care of him (Carlo has seven brothers and sisters) and sends him to work on a farm away from his family. Carlo is on his own; his only companion is his dog. At the age of eighteen, he becomes a butcher’s apprentice and soon develops a passion for music and painting. Enlisted to fight on the front during the war, he endures several shocks from which he will never recover. He has to be institutionalized in 1947 at the psychiatric hospital of San Giacomo near Verona because he suffers from hallucinations and fears of persecution. For the next ten years, Carlo has to put up with terrible hospital conditions of those times such as eighty patients packed in a twenty square meter ward; men who have never known silence or solitude; only moans, crisis, quarrels, strong arm interventions of male nurses. In 1957, the Scottish sculptor Michael Noble convinces Professor Mario Marini to open a workshop for artists. Carlo is forty-one years old. His life is forever linked to this workshop. | ||
| For the next fourteen years, he will produce almost three thousand drawings, mostly gouaches. His work is organized around the number four, as the holes in the bodies of his characters. This number also determines his everyday life. Vittorino Andreoli writes in the Publications de la Compagnie de l’Art Brut, fascicule 6: “In his everyday life, the number four had an obsessive effect on him: he asked for four cigarettes and four matches, turned the key four times in the key hole, repeated four times the same word.” In the final phase of his work (1966-1969), writing is used as a pictorial expression. The drawing itself becomes a rhapsody, almost incomprehensible. Words are laid out as if they were drawings, letters are repeated and carry as much intensity as the notes in Wölfli’s musical compositions. Even though Carlo has forgotten the real meaning of words, he gives them a magic sense. | ||
| The San Giacomo Hospital closes in 1971 and Carlo is transferred to the Marzana Hospital. His routine is changed as his everyday ceremonial, his private religion. At a loss, he can rarely paint. Eventually the Marzana Hospital also closes; Carlo is taken in by a family that does not take care of him. He dies in 1974. | ||
| SEE ALSO: Publications de la Compagnie de l’Art
Brut, fascicule 6, Paris, 1966. Publications de la Collection de l’Art Brut, fascicule 11, Lausanne, 1982. Carlo, tempere, collages, sculture 1957-1974 (Verona, Museo di Castelvecchio, 1992), Marsilio Editori, Venice, 1992. |
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