"Op.469 MMXIX" Painting

For thirty years "Rafferoico" (Raffaello Eroico) has been painting a single continuous work: numbered, rarely titled. Born in Naples in 1967, he lives and works in Toulouse.

He left school at fifteen for graphic design and served as a military photographer at eighteen, then spent a decade as a professional photographer in the last fully analogue era. That formation — from the American f/64 group to Ugo Mulas's Verifiche — still governs everything he paints.

The pivot was the pixel. In 1996 he made it his subject in a series of transmedial images; the same year, his modular decoration system was patented, put into production by an Italian ceramics manufacturer and shown at CERSAIE, Bologna. He then moved against the migration of the image into the digital: from 2004 painting became his primary medium, taken up in its most consumed and least original form — oil on canvas — precisely so that nothing would distract from the mark itself. Manual work as the deliberate antithesis of technology.

Two constants hold the œuvre together. The square, inherited from the 6×6 negative: a hortus conclusus in which the horizontal of the immanent and the vertical of the transcendent are given equal measure. And the numbering, which asserts the corpus over the individual picture — each work an episode in one investigation rather than a self-contained statement. Every canvas begins as a drawing, composed like a score, then executed with the plastic energy of paint.

Bodies, animals, landscape, drapery: an organic phenomenology held in a deliberately atemporal register, formed by the Neapolitan Baroque of Ribera and Caravaggio and, further back, by Giotto and Velázquez — refusing conceptual rhetoric and nostalgia alike. Eros is treated as a condition of vision rather than a subject. The work proceeds in cycles, most of them of nine: Let It Be, Fading Venus, The Longest Journey, Cahier d'un faune rêveur, Les mouchoirs de Zurbarán. The most recent, Vulnus, takes pathos as intrinsic to the organic and animal condition — and therefore, in his terms, inaccessible to any artificial sensibility.

Solo exhibitions since 1994 in Italy, France and China, including Palazzo Fondi, Naples, for the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia (2019, curated by Maria Savarese), and a residency at Da Wang Culture Highland, Shenzhen (2014). Works held in private collections in Europe and the United States.