Gianfranco Gentile was born in Verona in 1949. He spends his childhood in a military airbase village, where in 1955 he enters into to the world of the arts as a very young actor in the film “I Quattro del Getto Tonante” directed by Fernando Cerchi.

In the autumn of 1968 he moves to Florence and in 1973 he graduates in Architecture. A keen musician as a teenager, in Florence Gentile takes his first steps into the world of pop music.

In the middle of the 70’s he sets aside his performances to attend a four year course in the Phonology of Electronic Music run by Albert Mayr at the Luigi Cherubini Academy of Music.

In the following years Gentile occupies himself mainly with experimental music and electro acoustic improvisation.

He joins local Florence group “Nuova Musica” directed by Mayr and participates in contemporary music events in Italy and abroad: “Randfest”, Innsbruck, July 1975; Music and Visual Arts festival “Pratoeventi”, Prato, September 1976; “Musica  Performance 2” Pescara, September 1977; “Auslands Kultur Tage”, Erlanger, November 1977; “Settimana della Cultura Italiana”, Berlin, January 1980…

In those years, “Nuova Musica”, experiments with innovative forms, performing in concerts and shows of land music, intense atmospheres realized with a scientific use of sound, impulsive music and executions of verbal scores.

Right from the 70’s Gentile, thanks also to studies previously undertaken, experiments with the written word as a means of expression. He works on free-association, on the deconstruction of language already experimented on by Futurism and by the beat generation. He creates and improvises streams of words on the slipstream of the many jam-sessions of free music in which he participates as a musician.

This personal research gives birth to a large number of narrative and poetic inventions which in part become lyrics to his songs and poems.

In 1975 he collaborates on the arrangement to the soundtrack of the film-documentary about Brunelleschi, performed essentially on experimentations on vocal scores.

In 1974, together with other musicians from the Florence experimental scene, Gentile participates in the creation of an experience of musical animation that continues for a year and a half at the Volterra psychiatric hospital. These form part of the first experiments of music therapy in Italy.

(…)There was a rapport of interrelationship with the patients. We’d bring lots of instruments, mainly percussion, and we’d play together. A big jam-session with amazing results not only on the human level.  Old ladies able to play in  time with a drum machine, violent clusters of organ playing, voices like birds from the jungle, a solid, material sound”.

He’s author, co-author and also performer of the music in theatrical events of research and of innovative expression, including the 6 shows of  the “Teatro Invisibile” (Invisible Theatre), by Aldo Rostagno, with his provocative works in non theatrical locations.

Gentile remains in Florence for eleven years, up until 1979. In that year he moves to Rome to collaborate on “Finita Infinita”, a theatrical project by the singer/actress Maria Monti; a reading for actor, percussion and magnetic tape on the birth of theatre.

“The work of Monti and Gentile takes a step in the Age of Aquarius; it’s professionally a small jewel of cult-recitation (…)” Rodolfo Di Gianmmarco.

In Rome Gentile also collaborates with a small record label and resumes writing songs which will later become a rich catalogue for his pop-rock experience in the ten years between the middle of the 80’s and the middle of the 90’s.

In the winter of 1985, after moving back to Verona, he forms, together with musicians of a jazz-rock background, the band “Foreign Office”, in which he is singer, writer, and composer.

The band debuts in September 1987, qualifying amongst the 12 finalists of the competition “Viva i giovani 87” as part of the SIM HI FI at the Fiera di Milano. And in the following two months, with an original urban sound influenced by funk, reggae, fusion and pop, obtains an increasing consensus from public and critics and gains the title of the best rock band in the North East of Italy.

Gentile in the meantime, besides his activity as a musician, also undertakes some work as a graphic designer, designing objects for interiors and set designs for events tied to the fashion industry.

In the middle of the 90’s a moment for pause and reflection in his musical activity grants him the material and mental time to give birth to his long-time desire to express himself in the visual arts.

In 1997 his first exhibits of work executed with pastels on cardboard with a look of unusual angles to stress the aesthetic value of a reality absentmindedly coming to light in its daily movement in space.

In the same year he becomes part of the Associazione Architetti Artisti (Association of Artists-Architects) in Venice twinned with similar associations in France, Germany and other European countries.

His artistic work becomes increasingly fluent and he expresses himself through the use of a computer and with basic materials and pure dexterity, a route which has always characterised his artistic approach, from when he was looking for new sonorities and resonances by constructing new musical instruments by hand with recycled materials or by using analogue machines and new digital technologies.