Author of tactile and visual art –sculptures and paintings-, collective art performances and sensory experiences. “Seeing with the hands and touching with the eyes” is a relevant feature of his work, often realized in blindness.
He has practiced art since childhood, having lived in various countries in Europe and West Africa.
He has exhibited and realized collective art performances in Europe, Asia, Canada, the United States, Colombia and Australia. His first exhibitions took place in the years 68/69, in Germany.
Since 2000, he has been present in Assisi with a permanent exhibition of his iconic work.

Since 1999, he has been developing the complementarity of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, using digital tools and 3D animation.
His handheld sculptures, once enlarged, contain us so that “we are contained by what we contain”. Once reduced, it becomes portable. Its Shapes (Sculptures), tactile and visual, also become a multisensory experience when accompanied by sound, fragrance and possibly an edible element.
The sculpture, as well as the image, are for him part of an interactive, sensory and/or cognitive process.

In 1998, the first exhibition of the work MARIA took place in Barcelona, which has been installed to date in more than forty locations including cathedrals, churches, universities, and art centers throughout Europe and Asia. The Icon MARIA has been permanent, since 2000, in Assisi, since 2001 in Palma de Mallorca, since 2015 in Prague and Singapore and since 2017 in Lampedusa, Florence, Tufo and Barcelona.

In the 1970s, Dettoni saw that his way of working could become collective and thus started the creative process HANDSMATTER. In many cases, the shapes created by the assembled collective leads him to create his own works of art called TRANSMUTATIONS.
HANDMATTER has found various implementations. In the field of art with experiences in West Africa, Singapore, North, and South America, and various European countries; in the field of disability with interventions with deafblind people in Catalonia, the USA, and Canada.; in the field of teaching and therapy in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands.

The hands are mirrors of each other; two halves that form a unity, the brain, the source of speech. Hands-brain-word. With our hands, we manifest our feelings and emotions, and we can shape the surrounding reality within us, also because we are touching it and, at the same time, we are touched by it. (Guido Dettoni – Thoughts on art)