History
Gianluca “Giangi” Lanza was born in Biella on the 4th July 1970. His father, Ermanno, is a worker; his mother, Leonilde, is a nurse. Gianluca has got a sister, Rosanna, that recently has given birth to a child and has made him uncle for the first time. Since he was a teenager, he has been attracted by every kind of art. In this period, while he was studying as geometer, he starts to be interested in artistic experimentations so that he get always more close to tattoo’s world. When he was just a 15-year-old-guy he made on his hand the first tattoo. He drew an eye with an ace of spades inside – it is the symbol of looking at the future, but also looking at his own solved problems. He has never had teachers in its life. He’s an extraordinary self-taught person. He studies and reads loads of textbooks. His first knowledges on hygiene were given by his mother. His hands and his fantasy allowed him to build up the first self-constructed tattoo machines when he was just 18, but then some years later he moved onto professional machineries. Thanks to an updating course in Latina (2002) he improved his way of working with this kind of machines.
The professional turning point was in 1996, when Gianluca opened his first tattoo studio in Chiavazza (called “Mano Libera” (“Free Hand”) to emphasize that the designs are done directly on the skin or designed on paper in the first person by Giangi who rarely relies on others catalogs), but it is in April 2004 that his activities, which is in a continuous progression, consolidates moving in Biella, in a space of 135 square meters where the tattoos are flanked piercings, permanent make up and the selling of surgical steel jewellery. Giangi confesses that tattooing allows him to see the beautiful smile of all the people who look in the mirror the work just finished, together with the resulting satisfaction of having been the architect of a dream that will exist for the entire life. There is a smile of a costumer which impressed him the most and that he will never forget: the one of a ninety years old lady who wanted a tattoo on her body every year until her death and that was the smile he would hope to be able to see on his mother Leonilde’s face, who is the person that he dreams of tattooing in order to give an indelible mark of love and gratitude he feels for her.
Gianluca Lanza is a versatile artist: there is no subject impossible to achieve for him, which only admits to not particularly love the hyper realism in color, and does not want to tattoo satanic or blasphemous subjects and hands, feet, head, neck too in accordance with the ethnic groups through the use of symbols in those parts of the body, express their social rank or their religion. Although it is now an established and well-known artist, Giangi continues its evolution: after creating a studio that operates regularly in a Pub in Biella, he has just given life, in Brusnengo, to a second tattoo studio “InkInPink” in which the faithful student Giulia works and, in Biella, “Urban Tribe”, a clothing store, really close to the world of tattoo pin-up, rockabilly, militaria. The Projects for Gianluca Lanza do not stop here: in his mind – for now – there is the ambition to make the store “Urban Tribe” a real chain of stores and the desire to create a mobile studio tattoo, everything following by single motto: “As long as there is skin, there is hope”.
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