Giuliano Ghelli  Giuliano Ghelli (May 10, 1944 – February 15, 2014) was an Italian painter who produced several series of works, each rooted in the practice of drawing. An autodidact, Ghelli's early influences were informalism and geometric abstraction, from which he developed a cartoon-like style of figuration inspired by pop art and Surrealism. Ghelli was said to draw on affect over intellect, working personal interests and relations, and, later, dreams into his pictures; the Italian word "racconto" (narrative or story) often appears in the artist's titles. At age 17 Ghelli began to frequent the studios of several contemporary Florentine painters and soon met the avant-garde art dealer Fiamma Vigo (). Through Vigo's "Numero" gallery, Ghelli discovered a community of artists and writers who strongly influenced his approach to painting. Ghelli debuted in 1963 with two works on canvas in a group exhibition at Vigo's "Numero" gallery in Milan. He continued to exhibit his work in Vigo's galleries in Florence and Venice into the late 1960s. In 1972 Ghelli signed a contract with the "Sangallo" gallery in Florence; the associated stipend allowed him to paint full-time. From 1973 Ghelli's works tended increasingly towards figuration, with crudely drawn elements of landscape (hills, patches of sky, a line of trees at the horizon), road signage, mechanical elements and humanoid-robot figures. In 1974 he published the pocket volume "Il portapaesaggi" with text by the contemporary art historian Lara-Vinca Masini. In 1975 Ghelli's paintings were exhibited in New York and Los Angeles and in 1977 Ghelli returned to New York to exhibit his work and travel cross-country. Starting in 1978 Arezzo-based Novart produced a line of jewelry based on "Il portapaesaggi". From 1980 a "narrative dimension" emerged in Ghelli's prints and paintings. The sparsely-drawn hills, robots, and signage of the previous decade are joined by envelopes, houses, and the occasional hand-written phrase. In her text describing the paintings in Ghelli's 1983 Ferrara exhibition the critic Maria Luisa Frisa noted "The theme of romantic love ... in all its facets: desire, jealously, abandonment, distance. The interplay of narrative, landscape and technological artifact in Ghelli's work was commented by the art historian Lara-Vinca Masini in her 1989 "Arte Contemporanea", noting, in Ghelli's paintings, a "lucid, fable-like transcription of technology and robots."