Pozzallo, 10 May 1944 - Pozzallo, 9 August 1991

Ever since he attended Vocational Training, the only secondary school in Pozzallo, artistic tendencies began to emerge in him, which led him to portray everything in front of him, people, animals, still lifes and anything that interested him.

This inclination of his could, however, only find space at the Art Institute of Syracuse - the closest to Pozzallo - where, with good results, he studied painting, a discipline towards which he demonstrated that extraordinary versatility that would soon set him on a path more suited to his aptitudes.

Having finished his studies in 1963, at just 19 years old, he made the courageous decision to face the judgment of critics and the public, participating with various works in collective or personal exhibitions, receiving everywhere the appreciation of severe but rewarding criticism for a young novice.

In fact, he lived painting intensely and identified with it fully, because from it he received satisfaction and encouragement for works full of charm which, thanks to their brightness and beauty, managed to capture even the attention of very attentive observers.

Rodolfo Cristina, a nationally known painter, and Beppe Assenza, a European philosopher of art, recognized him as a very gifted and serious painter. Dino Villani remembers him as "a Sicilian artist who stands out from most of his fellow countrymen" who use to alter "the color of their land", while he manages to transfigure "the landscape around him into a lyrical atmosphere". The critic Gioacchino Lentini defined him as "a poet of painting", a concept later reiterated by Armando Galea, who finds the inspiring motifs of his painting in the artistic production of Giovanni Lucenti, a painting that delights the eye but also the heart for its poetic content.

Encouraging criticism, capable of giving him the right push to help him refine his sensitivity as an artist: sensitivity that led him to also dedicate himself, with extreme naturalness, to tempera, watercolours, drawings and etchings, thus giving free rein to his rich imagination and confirming in him the immediacy of the image that is typical of impressionist painters.

His paintings bear witness to this, where houses, earth and walls, sands and landscape, even make us feel the passage of the seasons, highlighting his joy and his melancholy, his sensitivity, the thoughts and worries of the moment: which is why it was easy to glimpse in his work the reverberation of his poetic soul, fueled by the reading of our greatest poets. Indeed, he was a poet himself, as confirmed by "I Know", dated 5 March 1969, one of the many poems written in moments of greatest inspiration: "In my town / a seafront / open to the west / where often / in the evening / the sky reveals to me / such an iridescent splendor / that I would like to wander in it / Eternal as / a smile of light".

At 36 he decided to complete his life and married Salvina Nuzzarello, with whom he shared, from that moment, joys, doubts, aspirations and uncertainties, together with the rewards of criticism, from which stimuli for new goals still came, stimuli further accentuated by the birth of his three children.

Family and work were for him a constant combination of serenity, to which he felt the need to also add the desire to communicate his innate passion to others: and he achieved this by teaching Art Education first in Scicli and then in Pozzallo, where he remained until his last days.

And he was an open, understanding, generous teacher, convinced that he could offer young people something truly his own: in fact, he wanted to make them understand how much joy colors and brushes can give and how a painting can arouse enthusiasm and inspire moments of serenity in those who stop to admire it. Furthermore, he considered the conversation with adolescents extremely healthy while the results obtained were confirmation of the validity of an intensely lived teaching.

Probably, these were the years of greatest creativity, as can be seen from the critics who continued to give him flattering evaluations.

And he had not lacked success even in the last exhibition in which he participated, the one on contemporary artists, held from 7 to 30 June in the "Il Guercino" art gallery in Milan, together with Fratantonio, Magneco, Fiume, Venditti and other well-known Italian painters.

Unfortunately, on 9 August 1991, at just 47 years of age, a kidney tumor not diagnosed in time put an end to a life punctuated by artistic successes, but also by physical suffering, against which medicine had proven powerless: death, preceded by five long months of tribulations, which was a traumatic tear for his young wife and three children, all under ten years of age, but it was also traumatic for our city which, with his passing, lost a a valuable painter who had been denied the works of his maturity, which are notoriously the compendium of a life.

Artistically speaking, Giovanni Lucenti had undoubtedly enjoyed that great natural gift that belongs only to a privileged few: knowing how to speak to others with the language of colours, a substantial expression of the versatility, feelings and soul of a painter, whose work is destined to last over time. Because his canvases are a tangible testimony that goes beyond life: thanks above all to his elegant brushstroke that managed to blend with the subtle vibrations of color, in a far-reaching poetic climate.

Source:Luigi Rogasi, Pozzallesi of the 20th century, one hundred names not to be forgotten.