The actor Painting

"‹Riccardo Rossati was born in Rome. He has started very young with oil painting. After classical studies in high school, he attended the Fine Arts Academy in Rome. Riccardo has then worked and exhibited for several years in Tunis and Paris, then in 2003 he moved to Holland where he worked with various galleries. His pictorial development became influenced, for content and sensibility, by Dutch realism partly linked to the German "new-objectivity " and partly to the ancient Flemish art. Rossati also deepened his pictorial research through various workshops in Norway with the painter Odd Nerdrum, the mentor of a current pictorial and artistic vein that makes craftsmanship and the recovery of the great themes of symbolism the real pivot of his artistic credo. Through his subsequent residence in China and Singapore he has had the possibilty to melt his own visionary European culture with the quite different Asian creative world. The emblematic point of this period was the solo exhibition in 2008 in Beijing at the "798 Art Center" that represents the beating heart of creativity in China. His work has been exhibited in major museum in Italy like the Archaelogical Museum in Palestrina and the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome. He now lives, works and teaches between Paris, Singapore and Bangkok. Riccardo Rossati paints large, powerful pictures of people. His fascination with the human body has in common with everyone's: a primal interest in muscle and posture, flesh and bones, at all ages of life. Rossati approach to his paintings informs us, the viewer, about the inner life of the subject-the emotions and spirits and the identity of the individual in the world at a particular moment in time. Rossati applies liberally on large canvas, and even though this technique is overwhelmingly potent, the enduring emotion is one of intimacy with the subject seeing someone in a unguarded moment, or engaging with that person's gaze. Themes often consolidate the works: a dawn or dusk sky in the background, a modern apartment block framing the subject, a red cloth somewhere on the ground, a familiar arm, a familiar face. Riccardo Rossati paints the people around us, the people we know well, the people we see in mirrors. "‹ Steven Smith