An archaic and rural Sardinia, made up of silent villages and low stone houses leaning against each other, made up of men busy patiently working in the fields and solitary animals grazing, a Sardinia represented by bare family interiors and objects of daily use: this is the world of Giovanni Dotzo (Isili, 1926), an artist of peasant origin, this is what his works tell us.

Starting right from the engravings, etchings and woodcuts, techniques learned at the Art Institute of Sassari, which, after starting to draw as a self-taught, he finally attended, under the direction of Stanis Dessy, from 1950 to 1952 thanks to a grant study. These are the years, those following the end of the Second World War, in which he met, among others, Mario Delitala and above all Carmelo Floris, who he considers “the most Sardinian of artists”.

Pencil and India ink drawings are added to the engravings: the techniques change, but what inspires and conditions Dotzo’s art is always the environment in which he was born and where, for much of his life, he lived: whether images taken from life or recovered through memory, Dotzo’s iconography is perpetually conditioned by the themes of life and the Sardinian agro-pastoral landscape, of which the artist narrates not only the forms but