How did you get started as an artist?
As a child, I started drawing even before I could speak because my vocabulary was focused on images. For me, drawing has never been just a means of reproducing from a photo or from life, it has always been a continuous search for the shape of things, their essence, their soul. In all my daily activities, I look at the things that surround me, I trace their contours and look for the vanishing points from where everything starts or where everything arrives.
Artistically, I was self-taught, studying the history of art and the great Masters in an aseptic way, without external contamination.
I went to the workshop of a master from Catanzaro for six years, from whom I learned a lot. Until 2002 I went around Calabria to paint from life, with the main aim of speeding up my hand and acquiring technique, fighting against time which changed lights and colors. Then I realized that something was missing inside me, I felt a feeling of emptiness. So at the age of 34 I decided to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catanzaro, aware that to give more depth to my work I needed to compare myself with other artists, exchange experiences and seek new stimuli.
In February 2007 I finished my studies and left enriched and very motivated.
The desire to do is very great. I get up in the morning and I want to paint. Late at night I go to sleep I feel empty and I think that another day has passed dedicated to the search for Strength in my work, because I have never tried to be and become a fashionable painter of the moment.
My effort to focus on pictorial quality and content.
In all my daily activities, I look at the things that surround me, I trace their contours and look for the vanishing points from where everything starts or where everything arrives
What themes does your work address?
My subjects are those whom the commercialized West has cleared through customs, for their music, for their art, for the sporting performances that send millions of people into raptures: they have broken the chains and now they put the ball inside.
Those who have an ancient history of prejudice and marginalization behind them.
Even today, if someone saw them outside their environment, they would call them non-EU citizens.
They are terribly and morbidly attracted to people, especially black ones, and I portray them with the utmost emotional intensity. The human figure is fascinating to portray, a real challenge. I'm looking for the right people, the very expressive ones, who are in my humble opinion, the incarnation and materialization of the Soul.
If man brought art into the street so that it could be enjoyed by everyone, why not bring the urban into galleries and museums?
My research leads me to read up on the stereotypes that crowd the musical genre, which I "feed" on while I paint.
The subjects of my paintings take shape from photos that I download from the internet, I process them on the computer and eliminate what is superfluous for me. I have a database of 5000 photos divided by artist, photographic style, social theme, projects for future exhibitions, etc.
I really like portraying Ja rule, Xzibit, The Game, Mary J Blige, Beyonce and 50 cent and the whole Italian hip hop scene, which is much closer to me.
Can you describe your creative process?
After having traced the very detailed drawing, I move on to oil color and glaze after glaze I arrive at the final result.
The new series of works on concrete is the one that is giving me the most; personal and professional satisfactions. Come was born? It was the result of an important investigation into my work in search of that "something" that I felt was missing.
Looking at my work over the last 10 years, I understood that there were semantics and semiotics in my visual discourse, but the right support to enhance them was missing.
Reinforced concrete, concrete was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It has a thousand-year history made up of amphitheaters, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now it is synonymous with modernity. Everywhere you go and come across a reinforced concrete wall, there is modern man.
From Sydney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, reinforced concrete is present and consequently the ideal support is present where writers can express themselves and express themselves.
The next step for me was obvious. If man brought art into the street so that it could be enjoyed by everyone, why not bring the urban into galleries and museums? It was the winning step in the continuous evolutionary process of my work, that something I said before that is leading me to exhibit in prestigious places and be requested by important collections.
I like to think that those who look at my sculptures created in 2020 -2022 will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us has felt in front of a planetary problem that was covid 19... under a layer of cement there are my clothes with which I lived this nefarious period.
Clothes that survived covid 19, very similar to what survived after the 2,000-year-old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, capable of recounting man's inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.
Do you have any artistic goals for the future that you would like to share?
I have one goal, to create my art and follow it wherever it is exhibited in the world. I believe very much in my artistic project and I believe, perhaps presumptuously, that it is ready and qualitatively mature to be exhibited in important places, which would give the right reward to all the sacrifices I have made in recent decades.
