Born in Turin in 1949, he studied in Turin at the Salesian Seminary in Valdocco. He does not follow the ecclesiastical vocation because the artistic and intellectual predisposition that lead him in the Seventies first to Bologna and then to Paris, where he has the opportunity to know among others Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. The initiation of Montesano painting takes place long before, while he was still a seminarian in Valdocco. Hence the choice of title, Gorera, a sort of "Arebours", a journey backwards to the places of memory and childhood. In the early 1970s his first works were, in fact, reproductions of Madonne and those sacred images, memories distributed to the faithful in shrines and during spiritual exercises. Montesano enlarges them and revisits them in a postmodern way, referring to the beautiful tradition of popular painting but also covering them with conceptual and theoretical meanings. There are several paintings dedicated to Turin and the memory of his father who worked as an "eccentric" in the world of avant-garde: The painting "Turin year zero" of 1989 is emblematic, an image of the child artist walking with his father. Since the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Montesano has been included in the context of so-called Mediaism, the current of pictorial revival, of neopop and cartoonist matrix, of which he was instead an absolute precursor. From this context however it differs a lot, because investigating the history and the past Montesano rereads the dramatic and crucial years of
