Edoardo De Candia retrospective in Lecce revives outsider artist's legacy

Over twenty years after his death, a major retrospective in Lecce is rehabilitating Edoardo De Candia, a controversial and long-ignored painter from the city. The exhibition features more than one hundred works, many previously unseen from private collections, tracing his artistic evolution. De Candia, described as a nonconformist and heretic, was marginalized by society and subjected to police and electroshock treatments for defying social conventions. His style recalls Fauvism and Post-Impressionism, particularly Matisse's soft line and intense polychromy. Nature was the central theme of his work, which he experienced physically—painting naked on his terrace using seawater, and walking nude from Lecce to San Cataldo. In the 1960s, he developed seascapes and horizons dotted with Mediterranean scrub. His erotic paintings, sold cheaply on the streets of Lecce, express a voluptuous female eros. Critic Lorenzo Madaro calls De Candia, alongside Ezechiele Leandro, the most extreme and outsider artist of 20th-century Puglia. The retrospective aims to provide a historical-critical reconstruction of his career.