Giovanni Crisostomo

Giovanni Crisostomo was born in Palermo in 1940.He spent his childhood and early adolescence in Marsala where he attended elementary and middle school at the Salesians.This was a very significant period of his training both because he approached music with the study of violin, and because of the proximity to the sea, a theme often present in his work. In fact, he lived in a large house in front of the island of Mozia and often in his memories come back the long summers spent on the beach swimming and fishing in the company of his beloved brother. He moved with his family to Corleone, attended the classical high school and at the age of fourteen he began to paint following Leo Castro who loved to worl “en plein air”. Leaving Corleone for Catania, here he studied painting with Remo Gerevini and drawing with Nunzio Sciavarello. At the same time, a strong interest in music was born, which resulted in an in-depth study of Flamenco guitar, thanks to a spanish girl who gave him a 45 rpm record with flamenco songs performed by the artist Nino Riccardo. The interest inthese new rythms leads him to Spain in search of musical scores, practically impossible to find in Italy where that type of music was combined with gypsy tradition. As a Flamenco guitarist he will perform in numerous evenings in the Roman Clubs “Folk Studio” and “Il Nocciolo” and hold several concerts in Milan at the “Sala della Stampa” and in Padua at the “Sala dei Giganti”. At the beginning of the ‘60s he moved to Rome and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts where he studied painting with Luigi Montanarini and Alessandro Trotti and set design with Peppino Piccolo. In the early 1970s he moved to live in Paris where he studied drawing with the sculptor Bernard Citroën and frequented the studio of Orfeo Tamburi. In Paris he continues to cultivate his passion for flamenco and plays in famous clubs such as “Le Lapin agile”, “Au port du salut”and “Chez le Catalan”. After the three years spent in Paris, he returned to Italy, alternating periods in Rome with others in Umbria, and then moved permanently in the early ‘80s to the Umbrian countryside near Monte Castello di Vibio (Perugia), where he actually lives and works.