Richard Silvaggio

Richard Silvaggio

Carrara, Carrara, Italy

About Richard Silvaggio

My name is Richard Silvaggio. I was born in Australia in 1976 and lived there for 12 years after moving definetly to Italy in 1988. Art for me has been an important element in my life; i started drawing since i was 5 years old and kept on doing untill the present day.

Education:

I enroll at the Fine art academy of Carrara and graduate with highest honors, writing a thesis entitled “Freak show, the ugly and the diabolic in art from middle ages to Contemporary art”, with Omar Galliani as a supervisor.
My artistic path begins following grotesque themes, combining physical objects, installations, to the paintings, (often represented by ugly and awkward characters), in order to gain major completeness to the work’s concept. Later on I felt the need to identify an essential code: the desire, maybe the need to push my work towards a formula of synthesis capable of expressing the drawings of my thoughts in a clean and instant attractiveness. I sacrificed color. I wanted to reduce the variables, to go along the inside conflict of my conscious state on a graphic level. In other words, the operation might unveil ingenuous reflexes, but the tension that pushes the thought to the extreme limit of contradiction is precisely human. We are not able to imagine death: it doesn’t produce images. We are also unable to crystalize the source of our thinking process, the self, therefore the fundament of life. I grasp my being as a transaction between two essential conditions that, however, I cannot see. And it’s between these two extremities, in a recursive ring, that my thinking substance consumes. I am, we are, the grey tone that elapses between black and white. The same grey that gives volume to the draperies I paint, draperies that in turn give volume to an empty figure that reveals, in truth, the absence during the act of searching and self questioning.
The challenge, in my opinion, is to reach to an esthetic, to an intrinsic beauty of image, that yes, conveys a content, but a content that, as a last extreme paradox, expresses the inexpressible: nothing.

Events:

Takes the first place at the Facebook Biennial of contemporary art curated by Giorgio Grasso. with the work entitled: The anonymous".

Exhibitions:

2005

-Solo show “L’alma Rosa,Forte dei Marmi; Italy
-collective exhibition “Pink Project” at “L’art Cafè” di Pietrasanta;
-collective exhibition “Pink Project” pressi Irida Gallery, Sofia Bulgaria;

2006

-“Arte in Fiera VII” Reggio Emilia;
-“Liberamente Libero”,collective exhibition at city library in Carrara
-“Liberamente Libero”,collective exhibition Panizzi ibrary, Reggio Emilia curated by Prof. Omar Galliani;

2007

-“Arte in Fiera IX” Reggio Emilia;
-“Una vaga idea di”, Solo show at Rolland Arredamenti La Spezia curated by C.Simonelli;
– collective exhibition at Torre Matilde, Viareggio

2008

-“Toccare, Ridere, Pensare” collective exhibition at Galleria delle Erbe (Carrara),curated by di Monica Ferrarini;
-“Armonia degli opposti”, personale presso Galleria delle erbe, a cura di Monica Ferrarini. Catalogo personale.

2012

-“La mente sul volto” solo show at Dragoncello, Sarzana.

2013

-“La mente sul volto” solo show at “Portrait café” La spezia;
-“Falling Florence” collective exhibition La bottega di Merlino. Florence
-“Sguardi Neorealisti” solo show at Palazzo Gambacorti, Pisa.

2014

-“In Fieri” collective exhibition at Sala dell’Agostiniana Piazza del popolo, Rome;
-“Save the children" charity exhibition Bologna Italy

2015

- collective exhibition at Palazzo Rosa, Carrara, curated by Blu corner Gallery.

- collective exhibition at St Petersburg gallery central united