The Mirror Painting

Domenico was the name of my paternal grandfather, Antonio that of my maternal grandfather. When I was born, in order not to do injustice, my parents gave me both. I was born in Castel San Pietro, a small town in the North of Italy. When I was 11, I convinced my parents to gift me not the usual pastels, but a box of oil colors. I studied in Rome, at La Sapienza University, where I graduated in History of Modern Art. In the practice of painting and drawing I am self-taught. During university I started working as a scenographer in some movies: “Finchè dura la tempesta”, by Bruno Vailati, when I created the interior of a submarine in a pose theater and “Italiani brava gente” by Beppe de Santis, drawing tanks and cannons of the II world war. Then I participated in a series of television documentaries, making huge realistic three-dimensionals geographic models, with mountains, rivers and marine depths. In 1968 I began to work as an illustrator in the monthly magazine "L' Automobile", for which I also wrote some articles and made photo shoots. So photography also became a job for me. In 1971 I entered the Team photo agency, collaborating with Italian and foreign newspapers. During this period I also worked as a teacher in graphics and photography courses aimed at cultural operators. My first participation in a painting exhibition was in 1975, with some drawings in a collective entitled "The sign of man". In 1976 I founded, with some colleagues, the A.G.F. which is still one of the best Italian photo agencies. Since then, painting and photography have always intertwined in my life. Having made reportages from many countries in Middle East, Asia, Africa, America and Europe, I felt that painting means traveling in space and time: distant lands, under a sky that evokes day and night toghether. Cities with towers, spiers and domes with bright colors, above which opens a cosmos crossed by stars, planets, galaxies. Traveling means also meeting characters I love and who are in everyone's memory, writers, poets, leaders, artists, movie stars, such as Charles Baudelaire, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Joan of Arc, Wassily Kandinskij, Marlene Dietrich, Buster Keaton, Amedeo Modigliani, Sitting Bull, Edgard Allan Poe. Then there are also imaginary characters, women and men. An imaginary ship, the Queen Lucretia, sails the oceans, engaged in various trades, not always legal.