It is no coincidence that all of his exhibitions for over fifteen years have had the same title, and this is why it was decided to number them starting from this one, also to immediately provide that sense of conceptual continuity that the artist has always pursued. As the curator writes, the concept reaffirmed in the title serves "... to reiterate a concept even more strongly: "time in process" potentially has no end, once defined - now a long time ago - that this is the heart of his research, and that every constructive action carried out by the artist has as its purpose the testimony of this concept, the awareness of what he himself asks of life, and discovers in art.
Thus, every fragment, every single work, every cycle of works, every exhibition is the piece of a single great project that develops like a "splendid obsession" in the creative soul of Campus. Everything starts and everything arrives there…”.
The idea of a process art, marked over time, in existential and historical human time, is experienced by Campus through a research that starts from elements that could be defined as "constructivists", which are modified, bent, inserted into the context and often experienced collectively, as when in the late seventies and early eighties, the artist "measured" the spaces of Piazza del Duomo in Milan with large live springs, or tried to enclose the nature of the cliffs within a human scale of Gallura. All this is found, more formalized, even in the smaller dimensionally works, as can be seen in the choice made in the exhibition.
Giovanni Campus was born in Olbia in 1929. during the 60s he comes to a geometric and constructive language, not forgetful of the industrial visual context.
During his career he obtained the attention of critics such as Giulio Carlo Argan, Umbro Apollonio, Lara Vinca Masini, Luciano Caramel or colleagues such as Bruno Munari. He also made stays in New York and Paris, useful for relating him to the international situation.
In the second half of the 1970s an environmental plastic activity also began, until it became preponderant: in this sense he carried out operations in the space of the city, such as the interventions carried out in Piazzetta Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1977 or in natural space, such as the "measurements" carried out in the early 1980s with the series of interventions Path Determination, carried out in places in his native Gallura in 1983,
From the 1980s we remember the personal exhibitions in public spaces, such as at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara (1987), at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte in Cagliari (1991), at the MAN in Nuoro (2000), the Civic Gallery of Modern Art in Gallarate (2003), at the G. Fattori Civic Museum in Livorno (2007), and again at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Cagliari (2021). He also creates site-specific sculptures, which find their setting, even permanent, in open spaces, such as those arranged in Tortolì in 2000, in Carbonia, in 2008, inside the Sculpture Park at the Idroscalo in Milan, in 2012.
