Born in Turin, he is an artist, writer, and theatre director. Initially oriented toward philosophy and theology, he spent several decades living in Paris before moving back to Italy, where he now lives and works between Rome and Bologna. During his long Parisian period, he became involved in the vibrant cultural scene, developing close friendships with philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. In the 1970s he moved to Bologna, where he began painting the images that had shaped his formative religious years—those of sacred art transmitted through the popular devotion of “santini.” He reinterpreted this tradition, moving it away from its popular-religious origins and reworking it in a key that could broadly be described as postmodern. From the late 1980s throughout the 1990s, he was associated with the so-called Medialism movement, an attribution he accepted with reservation and ultimately rejected, as his visual language is not merely metalinguistic but rather aims to reconstruct a mental form of “realism” reflecting on the enigmatic meanings of History. His painting is almost always in black and white, drawing on a repertoire of historical memory—necessarily photographic in nature—rooted in the collective imagination, especially focused on the dramatic and crucial decades of twentieth-century European formation up to its crisis. Alongside painting, he has also worked as a playwright and theatre director, founding a theatre company known for its experimental and innovative approach. He was invited to the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 2009, and to the Prague Biennale in 2003 and 2005. He has held solo exhibitions in major public and private venues in Italy and abroad. His work has been discussed by philosophers and critics including Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Sollers, Jean Baudrillard, Toni Negri, and Achille Bonito Oliva.