Walter Davanzo is a painter, photographer, designer and art director. Born in Treviso on 1 March, early on Walter Davanzo dedicated his energy to photography and painting, and started exhibiting in 1970 in his own city. After high school, he enrolled at Bologna University’s D.A.M.S. college of the arts, music and entertainment to pursue his passion. He concentrated mainly on German Expressionism, both in painting and cinema. Several trips abroad involved visiting the famous galleries of Europe’s capitals. He spent 5 years in France, mainly in Paris, and then in Brittany and Normandy. Other study trips took him to Africa, the Mediterranean area, Kenya and Morocco, thus reinforcing his interest in primitive signs and children’s graphism.

He was much impressed by the paintings of F. Bacon, Munch, Henri Manguin, Varlin, Enry Matisse, Kess Van Dogen, and M. de Vlamick, on how they convey, on canvas, human events, and the use of colour.

Early on, he held several personal photographic exhibitions in various Italian cities, and later held only painting exhibitions. After a first abstract-informal stage, he directed his pictorial research with strong gestural touches to a free and naive figuration, made up of dream-like grotesque images between dream and reality, with childhood references, giving life to figures with a Fauvist-Impressionist structure. His research is one ongoing, of the signs of man in nature and of his existence through a photographic painting made up of caption-like sequences that he faithfully reproduces in pictorial form. His figures have very strong colours, with childish graphics, the joy of life of man, but also with tragedy in the making. The themes are cyclical: legs, planes, dogs, cityscapes, colonies, portraits mostly beige, indigo, black, white, bitumen of Judea and resin. The desire to salvage all those graphic works and old photographs, musical scores of his great-grandfather musician, old maps and land-registry documents, is a re-living of childhood lost and then found again.

We remember the personal exhibition in 2008 in Madrid at the Italian Institute of Culture on the occasion of NOCHE in BLANCO.
He has collaborated as Art Director at the Asolo Art Film FESTIVAL, with Happiness, Replay, i-SENS, Rude Riders, Dhea, Meeting, Opificio Bikers, and Technogel.
His works are found in museums and private collections, the documentation of his works at the ASAC of the Venice Biennale, and at the Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst Bibliothek, Aachen.

In his bibliography, it is worth mentioning the artist’s presence in the series “La Pittura nel Veneto, il novecento”, dictionary of artists of  three volumes published by Electa, Milan.

Walter Davanzo lives in Treviso.