Beyond Gender, Beyond Genre

Ivan Cattaneo’s punk-electro-futurist provocations turned Italian pop into a medium of queer expression and cultural subversion.

In the landscape of Italian pop culture, Ivan Cattaneo remains an outlier, someone whose work, presence, and persona constantly eluded definition. Long before terms like queer or gender-fluid entered the mainstream vocabulary, Cattaneo was embodying all of it: flamboyant, intellectual, erotic, irreverent, and above all, fiercely original. Musician, songwriter, visual artist, performer, and provocateur, he moved through the 1970s and 80s with a clarity of vision that often left audiences and critics scrambling to catch up.

Speaking today with disarming lucidity, Cattaneo is both amused and vindicated by the resurgence of interest in his work among younger audiences. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” he says. “Now they say I was ahead of my time. Finally.”

That work spans a career shaped as much by Milan’s Brera Academy as by the post-glam undercurrents of early 1970s London. After a formative period in the UK, where David Bowie, Eno, and a still-underground queer nightlife left a deep imprint, he returned to Italy by accident, dodging military service thanks to a “psychological incompatibility” declaration furnished by a friend. The timing was fortuitous. He started doing small music performances organized by the underground magazine Re Nudo; during one of these, he caught the attention of Nanni Ricordi, who offered him a deal with the radical label Ultima Spiaggia.

Ivan Cattaneo, Nanni Ricordi and Roberto Colombo, 1978.

His early albums, especially U.O.A.E.I. and Primo Secondo e Frutta (Ivan compreso), stood in stark contrast to the rigid expectations of Italian pop. He wasn’t interested in hits. Ivan was inventing a language: an irreverent, genreless mix of poetic nonsense, performance art, glam rock, and dadaist theater. But it was with Superivan in 1979 that Cattaneo began crafting a pop persona as sharp as it was subversive. With Roberto Colombo as producer and collaborators like Premiata Forneria Marconi musicians in the studio, he refined his sound into something more playful yet musically precise. The album’s visual identity, a photomontage of Ivan’s face on a bodybuilder’s torso, signaled a new phase: homoerotic, synthetic, and defiantly camp.

“People today have brands and stylists,” he says. “Back then, I had nothing but instinct and courage. I was throwing myself into the storm.”

He exercised total control over his output, writing his own lyrics, designing his album covers, styling himself for television appearances, and even directing set designs for cult TV shows like Mister Fantasy. It wasn’t about spectacle for spectacle’s sake. It was about authorship. “I never saw myself as just a singer,” he explains. “I was always an artist, someone who created entire worlds.”

Urlo di una spia in agguato (Avant la guerre), released in 1980, wasn’t just radical in sound, it was a visual manifesto. Designed with Studio 3040, the fold-out cover unfolds like a surrealist collage, with Cattaneo’s face split, mirrored, and layered in bold hues and cryptic iconography. The fragmentation of identity on the cover echoes the themes of sexual fluidity explored in the album’s standout track Polisex, a prophetic celebration of non-binary desire long before the language existed to define it. The title stretches across the panels like a secret message, anchoring an album where music, image, and ideology merge into one unclassifiable whole.

Other two records from the 80s stand out as crucial to understanding the complexity of his vision. Italian Graffiati from 1981 was an album of covers that many initially misunderstood. For Cattaneo, the project was not a nostalgia exercise but a meta-pop intervention, an idea born one New Year’s Eve in Paris, where he performed on the same stage as Blondie. After the concert, he wandered into a nightclub where guests dressed in looks from past decades, from 1950s wigs to retro tailoring. The scene sparked the idea: why not revisit the songs of his own childhood, both classics and forgotten gems, but rework them using modern sounds, aesthetics, and codes? The result was a queer time machine: 1960s hits reimagined through the lens of new wave, synth-pop, and a bold gay identity that completely reframed their meaning. A song like “Nessuno mi può giudicare” (“No one can judge me”), originally sung by a woman in a patriarchal context, suddenly became a proud anthem of defiance. The album sold over 475,000 copies, reaching far beyond his underground base. Even its cover, his own concept, played on time travel, with two versions of himself: one in the present (1981) and another projected into 2060, older but no less defiant. The inner sleeve image, where Ivan holds a bathroom air freshener to his ear like a phone, unintentionally predicted the mobile era, cementing Italian Graffiati as a pop artifact both ahead of its time and deeply rooted in it.

Ivan il Terribile (1982) was a pivotal album that responded to a shifting musical landscape. With Italo disco at its peak, Ivan leaned into a more structured pop sound but retained his edge through sharp, cinematic arrangements and songs that carried a sense of theatricality and erotic unease. The album’s visual concept was just as groundbreaking as the music. Presented as a photo book, it featured Ivan in a sequence of hybrid, often surreal looks, part cybernetic humanoid, part gender-fluid alien. Each page blurred the line between physical presence and virtual identity, projecting a futuristic being that defied binary definitions of male or female, human or artificial. The cover itself, with its lightning bolt graphics and newspaper hat, felt both playful and anarchic, perfectly embodying the spirit of an artist who refused to conform. “It was my response to the times, but it was still 100% me,” he says, an evolution without compromise.

“People didn’t realize I was doing pop art, like Warhol,” he says. “I was taking these cultural objects, old songs, and giving them new frames. It was ironic, but with love.”

The international art world took note as well. In the early 1980s, Cattaneo performed at Madison Square Garden as part of an Italian showcase organized by Maurizio Costanzo. Through his friend Leonardo Pastore, then director at the Fiorucci store in New York, Ivan was introduced to the city’s downtown art scene. Encounters with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and a pre-fame Madonna were casual but telling. “It was a different world,” he recalls. “Art, fashion, music, they were all the same thing, all happening at once.”

Cattaneo never stayed still. He would later withdraw from the mainstream, dedicate himself more fully to painting, and continue exploring identity through multimedia installations. “Expression isn’t a career,” he says. “It’s how I live. I don’t stop being an artist when I’m off stage.”

In recent years, his work has resurfaced among younger audiences thanks to social media platforms and niche curators. On Instagram, vintage clips of his televised performances draw stunned reactions from Gen Z fans who can’t believe something so bold aired on national Italian TV in the early 80s. “They see me in ’82 and say, ‘How was this even possible?’” he laughs.

It’s tempting to frame Ivan Cattaneo’s legacy as “rediscovered,” but that would imply it was ever lost. The truth is, he was always too far ahead to be easily categorized. And now, as new generations begin to value authenticity over marketability, fluidity over rigidity, and authorship over algorithm, his work feels not only relevant, but prophetic.

“I never wanted to be better than anyone,” he says. “I just wanted to be unique.”

And in that, Ivan Cattaneo never failed.