Edoardo De Candia, Disegni Erotici, 2025

Edoardo De Candia, “A heresy that does not attack,” as the poet Vittorio Pagano brilliantly dubbed him in 1971, or “A knight without land,” the perfect definition Antonio Verri bestowed on him in 1988? Or, first and foremost, an artist, a builder of impossible worlds, an irregular yet possessing within himself a magma of experiences, visions, and imagery that also touched on art and art history? But who really was De Candia, the Salento artist who died in 1992 at the Vito Fazzi Hospital in Lecce, where he was born in 1933, after an intense life immersed in the depths of drawing and painting, in a long and constant wandering toward the sea, where he dived to rediscover an all-encompassing dimension in which art and life are one great vortex? That vortex of signs, traces, spaces, objects, and stereotypical forms that with him took on an unusual life through a rapid, urgent, instinctive yet thoughtful brushstroke (in the sense that painting for him was a tender form of meditation). Much has been written about it, often inappropriately, peppering his story with clichés or stories tied to his character rather than his identity as an artist. A tireless walker, a diver into dreams, a nomad in life and art, he eventually settled permanently in the city that saw him born and then slowly die, under the watchful eye of right-thinking people who even today, more than thirty years after his passing, think of him as a nudist ante litteram, a savage.