Artist Giovanni Campus died yesterday in Milan at the age of 97. Art critic and curator Maria Dolores Picciau, former Councilor for Culture for the Municipality of Cagliari, offers us a thoughtful tribute.
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It's a piercing pain, one that cuts deep, that accompanies the announcement of Giovanni Campus' passing. A ninety-year-old who carried within himself the absolute contradiction between the passing of time and eternity: his mind, mathematical and erudite, vibrated with that creative energy that only the great can maintain intact. The news, which came chillingly last night, is almost a betrayal: the man we all thought eternal is no more. This is not only a loss for art, but for all Sardinians, an emotional, intellectual, and artistic bond woven with great pride in the excellence he represented.
Born in Olbia in 1929, Campus was an artist of almost monastic rigor, a figure who embraced logic, philosophy, and erudition to shape his conceptual universe. After quickly moving beyond his early pictorial experiences in the 1950s, he moved on to experimenting with geometric and constructive languages, even using methacrylate, a material that allowed him to explore the aesthetic possibilities of industrial perception. These were years of intense critical attention, from Giulio Carlo Argan to colleagues like Bruno Munari, and of exhibitions that placed him at the center of contemporary debate. From the 1970s onwards, however, his research became more environmental and relational, with his celebrated "measurements" and interventions in urban and natural spaces, such as in Milan and his native Gallura.
Campus was not a man of compromise: his youthful decision, as an emigrant to Milan, to live solely from his work as an artist, made him implacable. He selected critics and galleries carefully, demanding professionalism and competence, never out of banal elitism, but out of uncompromising professional integrity. It is precisely within this framework of integrity that the two projects for Cagliari that I had the honor of sharing with him fit. For me, they were not simple collaborations, but unforgettable moments of exchange, essential for the city.
