Gabriele Donnini

Gabriele Donnini

GABRIELE DONNINI Rome, 1962

“The tattoo artist is a magician who brings out memories, love, hate on the skin; he is a storyteller” explains Gabriele Donnini, one of the “best known” tattoo artists in the capital and today also the author of works that are unique pieces like his tattoos; fragments of the artist’s soul that move into another person, or momentarily splits himself on canvas, transferring into his work, whether it is a piece of skin or an object or a wooden board or a sheet of paper, a personal feeling, an emotion, a pain captured in the other or recovered from his past. Works of art in which the components are creativity, skill, inventiveness, passion, experience, effort, and love for his work.
The use of the body as a means by which one can indelibly impress a memory or one’s emotions or tell part of one’s experience by synthesizing it in a sentence, a symbol or a drawing has very ancient origins, it seems to date back to 3300 BC; with a healing function, perhaps of the soul as well as of the body or to emphasize an ethnic and tribal belonging. Much more recently, the Body Art theorized by Allan Kaprow in 1959 meant that the skin became a filter of experiences that are projected outside, revealing itself to be an amplifier of emotional experiences to be shared with one’s community.