Leo Chiachio y Daniel Giannone

Biography

Danny was born in Córdoba, Argentina, one hot december of 1964. Leo was born in Banfield, Buenos Aires, during Mother’s day, on October, 1969.
Since its early childhood, L studied drawing and painting with a professor, at Lomas. She made him copy the pictures that appeard on “7 Días” magazine, or “National Geographic”. He painted a lot using tempera, shading in his pictures and drawings using all pencils at hand, copying the plaster replicas of still lives. At the end of each year he used to take his exams at the Chopin Institute, who was then ran by a group of sisters, all of them old maids. They would later on go for a pizza and celebrate his remarkable results. He graduated aged 14, and then there was the void.
He wandered about the streets thinking what would he become, while on secondary school. A light appeared. He entered through the door of a ceramics atélier, the Bambuco studio. For L it was a religious experience. At age 15 he was already modelling with clay and all his classmates being much older than him: it was heaven. Everyone encouraged him to continue his art studies. He was thinking on Biology, but eventually he also felt comfortable with art. Thus, he eventually entered the Pueyrredon art school at age 18 and at that very moment started working with fellow nuts like him, always older, at Medio Mundo Varieté and at a theater in the corner of Corrientes Ave. and Rodríguez Peña st. (today it’s a porn theater), doing the sceneries and some intervention on the wardrobe. He graduated from Pueyrredón school, started La Cárcova and it was there that he met Pablo Suárez, Tulio de Sagastizábal and Ahuva Slimowicz. Religious experience number 2.
A couple of years later, at an exhibition done at El Chino’s place, he met D. Falls deeply in love with that blond from Córdoba and (it is said, since they are very confidential on they private lives) they live together ever since, having three children: Santino, Doménico and Piolín. They pass their days embroidering and leading a family life.
D. had a life marked by religion. He was born and grew-up in a home of italian melancholic immigrants with their feet on mediterranean ground, but with their eyes and heart fixed in Italy. Since his childhood he was considered a special boy by the women of the house. He loved collecting his sister’s velvet and glitter picture cards, recreating himself on each one of them. When he was not playing with the picture cards, he would jump on top of the pillars of the garden and play as if he where a music singer. Early in his life he began embroidering at the Nun school he attended, sharing this activity with 30 other little girls, embroidering flowers all day long until he couldn’t, and dedicating them to his mother but later on hiding them inside his satchel that smelled leather, fearing that eventually his father would discover him and call him a faggot. He was always a good student with excellent qualifications. When he was ten, he bought his first art book, on Van Gogh. Without knowing why, an indeterminate fear took over him and paralyzed him. He was never able to paint again, thinking his ears might fall, or he would go insane. That was a recurrent thought for many years, leaving him perplexed just by smelling the oils. It is said that, not so long ago, when he sold several paintings of his, that he had done along with L, he dreamt again that he was being locked in a mental institution. He wandered about the studios of the art school he attended and the ateliers of those he considered to be his masters: Teresa Lascano and Sergio Bazán. He often recalls that his liberation took place at a psychiatrist divan, and that being far away from his cordobese loved-ones set him free of such a pressure, and that it was then that he happily turn himself to painting again.

D. is invited to the exhibition at el Chino’s place and before it ended he discovered himself with his arms around a dark-haired boy. He wanted to know more about him, but this brave young man from Buenos Aires dissapeared with the moon. It is said it was hard work to conquer him. The brave dark-haired boy, on the contrary, alleges the opposite: having fallen completely in love from the word go.
Truth is that the images of one started arousing in the work of the other one and viceversa.
D. went back to his embroideries and flowers and arabesques covered L’s perfectly delineated figures. It seems as if with the strategy of taken over one another, like Narcissus, they started out portraying each other in the sceneries of their lives; this one and the other ones.

Vision of art