For Gualtiero Passani, drawing was the expressive medium he most used. He sometimes happened to find him sitting at a table in a bar where he went to have breakfast, intent on splashing on a block the strangest customers, those who intrigued him the most. For the artist, drawing has always been a natural, instinctive fact, he began to trace a figure without interrupting the line, without uncertainties, without correcting, as if by magic everything was already formed in his mind.

With the drawing he represented the discomfort that struck Italy during the war, documenting the horrors that were perpetuated in those years and the hope of post-war reconstruction, many of these works highlight the poverty of those years, but, despite everything, even if certain figures linger on people’s discomfort and the consequent suffering, they reveal a faint hope, as if to indicate that all is not lost and a future of well-being may still exist.

Irony has always coexisted with Passani and thanks to the drawing, he has also managed to immortalize the lust hidden in religious circles, the itchy situations that occurred in brothels, sacristies and in all those environments where the woman, proud of her beauty and source of desire, he could exercise his attraction towards the male, ever smaller and insignificant in the eyes of Passani.

One of the most proposed subjects is that of the madman, Passani loved to emphasize the posture, the facial expression, the clothing, he showed affection for these creatures placed on the margins of society, often he put in contrast in his drawings the gestural freedom of the madman with respect to the rigidity of the controller, he did the same with the world of the Circus and the Luna Park, where he created many characterizations of the various characters, giving each subject the role of protagonist.

Some drawings just mentioned rise to the finished work because you feel that there is nothing else to add, probably done in a very short time they remind me of the answer that Pablo Picasso gave to a guy who contested the lack of time he had taken to create a work: “It took me a lifetime and 5 minutes to do it”