• Marco Campanella was born on 23 June 1971 in Bari. During his early childhood, he moved with his family to Canada for one year and started to become familiar with, and develop a taste for, Anglo-Saxon culture.
• He spent the rest of his childhood in Naples and in 1980, at the age of 9, he took part with a drawing in an international competition organized by ESA (European Space Agency) on the occasion of the first launching of the Space Shuttle. At the end of the selection among the students of all school grades, he came out as the winner for Italy and, together with all the winners of each European country, he went to Cape Canaveral on the prizewinners’ journey .
• His evident talent for drawing, encouraged and supported from his first grades in school, led him to choose artistic studies. In 1985 he returned for another year to Canada, where he did some illustrations for the review “Alma”.
• After finishing his studies at the Liceo Artistico of Naples, he attended the Istituto Europeo di Design for one year in Rome and at the same time studied naturalistic illustration with Franco Testa. During the same period he published his first books with some Neapolitan publishers.
• In 1996 he attended specialization courses with Adelchi Galloni and Lisbeth Zwerger. At the same time he increasingly cultivated another of is great passions: sculpture.
• In 1997 he met the painter Margherita Pavesi Mazzoni and together they designed the scenery for a theatrical performance.
• In 1998 he moved to Milan where he started to work with Dami Editore, with whom he still publishes books translated and distributed also in the United States, France, Germany, England, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Greece, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Indonesia, Finland, Australia, Korea, Mexico, Hong Kong, Georgia, South Africa, Romania, Poland, Serbia, Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, China, Turkey, Hungary, Estonia and Latvia.
• In the year 2000 he moved to Swizerland where, desiring to dedicate more space to his growing passion for sculpture, he started to work in the Atelier of the Argentine sculptress Gabriela Spector.
• In 2002 he returned to Naples where, in 2003, he sculpted a monument to Mother Teresa, for the square named after her. At the opening ceremony of the Square and the monument, during a meeting to promote the twinning of Naples and Calcutta, the Mayor and Cardinal of Naples were present and a vast delegation from the Indian town, led by the Mayor.
• In 2004 one of his best-known characters, realized with Dami Editore, Topo Tip, became known all over the world and was selected in Germany (as Leo Lausemaus) for an advertising campaign. While implementing this project, in the same year he sculpted a bronze Madonna for the Circolo Posillipo in Naples.


Art and I

Art… a word defining something in itself mysterious and indefinable, elusive and subjective. I often realize that for any artistic expression there is someone who appreciates it and recognizes himself in it, who finds a piece of himself told in one of the numerous and magical paths of creativity. In my short experience, I am always surprised to find that my works have such a different response according to who is looking at them. Maybe this is to be expected, yet according to me it says much about the nature of art. Art, when it is really such, is able to open up a small aperture between life on earth and the impenetrable whole that lies beyond what is normally perceived. When this happens, art may become a bridge, can turn into shamanic magic, allowing us to rediscover that we have wings and are able to touch, even if only for an instant, upon new horizons for our consciousness. Like religion, art can accomplish this miracle in our souls or even only enable us to glimpse the possibility of it, by putting us in contact with our divine nature… with divine beauty. I can imagine the emotions of those man who first tried to reproduce the magnificent beauty of the nature surrounding them. In their works the sacred value of art is evident, which becomes a bridge between man and the divinity within and outside each of us, which is the origin and end of our intimate path of searching. Through the creative process, I always spontaneously bring into focus a new discovery I have made about myself and my life experience, about my journey as a man longing for answers. I believe that every man can transform himself, and what he does, into a work of art, if only he really manages to transform himself into a channel of his own uniqueness, if he becomes a disinterested singer of his own human experience, purifying his song from all the social and cultural superstructures that limit its divine nature. I know that this is a very hard aim to achieve, even for those that the world usually identifies as artists. Too often, especially in contemporary art, I find only cunning and the will to uphold and gain acknowledgment from those who dictate the rules of art, from those who sadly guide its economy.
“The artist opens up forms of work to transcendence” as J. Campbell says, who defines art “[…] as the revealing power of maya: art as production of ‘divinely superfluous beauty’, objects that cause aesthetic arrest and have no practical utility, but open up to inner dimensions”. Yet it is exactly this characteristic of art, of being superfluous in the practical life of the human being, that often lead to a crisis in my experience as a young artist in this globalized world that more and more forgets the importance of invisible, impalpable food for the soul, which is often uneconomic and does not follow the fashions imposed by industries and economies. But also the transformation brought about by the coming of the information age, putting us always face to face with all the world’s tragedies, has radically changed our perception of life and dramatically increased the sense of helplessness which often conditions the life of young people.. And it is this feeling of being small and impotent which sometimes undermines my conviction of wanting to travel this path and which increases my mistrust in the contribution that I, in my small way, can bring to humanity with my art.
But all this is overcome by the consciousness that art can become a channel for new possibilities, a sower of a higher consciousness for humanity, a bridge between us and infinity, between us and the impenetrable mystery that is the origin and end of life… this is the art I hope one day to achieve.