Born on 14 April 1960 in Chignolo d’Isola in the province of Bergamo, Ivan Picenni lived in a farmhouse with his family for the first three years of his life. When his parents moved to Switzerland for work, he had to leave this happy life and go to a boarding school until the age of eight. This event triggered in the artist the desire, the anger and at the same time the joy of talking about his childhood which left indelible marks on his skin, both positive and negative. Always a self-taught painter, Ivan paints his childhood through the symbols that characterized it, including the pig, the ladder, the kite, the bicycle, the barriers, the college and the farmhouse where he lived with his parents before they moved to Switzerland in search of new paths. Supports and colors lose importance when faced with the desire to recreate those intimate moments full of sadness, joy, happiness and sensitivity.

Childhood memories are still vivid and palpable in Ivan’s mind, as if everything happened yesterday. His works of art are a portal capable of transposing both him and the viewer into the artist’s past, memories that relive and are reborn through his own canvases. In those rural landscapes where the family lived to give him and his brothers a better future, then leaving peasant life and moving abroad.