Who is Giosy Cervo?

Data: 1970-2005 ca. 

Luogo: Napoli

Autori: Giorgio Marinelli & Renata Rodriguez

Fonti: private collections, second hand shops and markets

Between seventies and nineties stickers were one of the preferential vehicles of advertising and visual communication at all levels: from large brands to small local businesses. Stickers are pocket-size, they interact directly with end-users, who make them their own, emancipating local phenomena of marketing resistance to the dictates of modernist corporate identity.

Giosy Cervo &Co. certainly noticed all this, an advertising agency which, despite its radical and continuous variation, left its signature on the stickers it produced, testifying to professional continuity  and at the moment the only almost official trace found.
Within a way much larger research and collection, we have found Giosy Cervo's signature several times - GiosyCervo Pubblicità, ideastudio di Giosy Cervo, GiosyCervo&Co. We managed to find little information on the elements that made up the working group: we know that the same name - Giosy Cervo - had been used several times to enter a team of Neapolitans in various national bowling tournaments, sometimes even winning first place; we know that he also worked on Neapolitan editorial publications, had relationships with local radio stations such as Kiss Kiss Napoli, a clothing boutique, vinyl and telerecord shops as evidenced by the stickers found. All this taking in echoes of different currents of formal design, from the photographic approach (03) to the direct embrace of a modernist approach (06) passing through the sketch illustration in the form of a comic strip (08).

Giosy Cervo is the face covered by a thousand masks of the Neapolitan Graphic Design of those times, taken aback and unsettling, in the continuous search for an identity and in the meantime interpreter and generator of the constitutive directives of the entire spirit of those times where experimentation and questioning were the cornerstones of an entire cultural approach.

Tracing information on the Neapolitan realities of the era before the internet is a challenging thing but we will continue to pursue the research, hoping we can discover original echoes of our mixed culture.

Contact us if you know something about or you are even just interested in it! :)