Giancarlo Pavanello has been born in that Venice where the ancient walls of the dwellings mirrored in the waters of its canals look like pages and pages of a book corroded by discolouring stains, by crevices , by the innumerable marks left by chance passers-by in action painting, in dripping, in texturologies, in “cretti” by some Pollock, Dubuffet, Burri and primordial Tapies.
Watching that mural book, Pavanello works on a basically elusive contamination. Such is for example his “Manuscript poetry” where the reader is led to perceive the larval presence of synglossies , a word coined by Rossana Apicella, criss-crossings of visual and verbal languages, transcribed by means of rigid and dense yet readable signs, but anyway slowly drifting towards a sinking of the meaning by continuous overlapping of frayed phonemes-graphemes, maybe out of nostalgia for the inextricable magma of the unfathomable page of his origins.
Pavanello says: “ I refuse the new high-flown poetry, the neo-classic pseudo-versification and all that goes on being rehashed to act as a fence for the editions of the classics of the twentieth century. Unbearable pollution by logorrheic anti-poetry.” Thus, by contrast, with his more recent “Laconic poetry” Pavanello supports an extreme concision of expression in texts consisting of an isolated neologism or in the association of two nouns and one adjective or one present participle acting as catalysts in an asyntactic composition.
Or, by another, elusive as we said solution, by clicking photo pictures to capture transparencies, reflections and graffiti of a metropolitan fleeting moment.
Or yet again by having another go at the book, with pages-boxes thrown haphazard
in a heap.
  On the banks of the river of time, Pavantello is incessantly busy capturing a significant link between the intervals of the hic et nunc and the immemorial past.
Arrigo Lora Totino, May 2006

his life and works


  Giancarlo Pavanello, born in Venice in 1944, has been living in Milan since 1978.
The first poems of his, which he refrained from destroying, are dated 1960, as do his drawn designs and his emphatic graphs, while his “Visualized Poetry” (real calligraphic texts with verbal-visual intentions) had its beginning around 1972. His first one-man exhibition “from the art brut to socialist aesthetics” (Nuovo Spazio, Venice) took place in 1975, the seond “discovering semantic or pseudo-asemantic eidoglossia” (Il Canale, Venice) in 1977.
  Up to 1969 he exhibited solely artist’s books or objects, mostly as unicum pieces. This date marks a new period, in which he experimented new techniques, but always with the purpose of conveying texts for which he prefers the formula “figurate poetry”. Notable, in the respect, his one-man show “Bibliographical exhibition” (Milan, Avida Dollars, 1989.
  Many are his published works from 1973 onwards, of which we may quote Epigrams written with a peacock’s feather, Geiger,196; The sash window, Guanda
1978; neon Amadeus, 1986;, poesia laconica, ixidem 1999; ciclo, ixidem, 2001. Not only books of poetry, but also essays and stories.
  After some youthful publishing or para-publishing experiences in the early seventies,
he created the publishing logos “ixidem” (“ibidem” with an unknown element) taking up again with continuity the publication of private press books that is craftsman’s or artist’s books, since 1944.