Man 1 Print

I was born in the previous century in a country that does not longer exist by almost 30 years. Everything in my family had somehow to do with art: my grandmother was a passionate collector, my grandfather was an eclectic and he was easily able to complete an academic painting in one evening, and make a wooden sculpture the morning after. In fact, we never missed an art exhibition in the neighbourhood. So it was quite natural for me to have a sketchbook and some pencils of my own. From my very first childhood memories I remember myself draw something either out of boredom or to reproduce something. As soon as I was old enough, my parents signed me up to an art school. Notwithstanding my natural interest and predisposition towards art, I ended up with a Bachelor degree in Linguistics and started travelling a lot. I moved to Rome without a specific reason and there I studied philosophy in a catholic university (LUMSA). I still kept painting, for no reason, out of boredom, loneliness, or just because I was surrounded by too much beauty. I guess it was then, that a Babel Tower story-like repeated itself and a new form of things appeared to my mind: “…, observing their city…, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other” (Gen. 11, 1-9), and suddenly and slowly everything began taking true shape. By that time I had already understood the limitations of words, when discovered an excellent art school in Rome (Scuola di Arti e Mestieri San Giacomo, Roma). Like a blind man who sees the light for the first time, again I started studying drawing and later artistic restoration and conservation. My maestro, prof. Giovanni Arcangeli, used to say that art is a synthesis but too many ideas were coming into my head way too fast for me to translate them into art. I guess my personal artistic style began to form from this need to express a multitude of thoughts and emotions at once. When I participated in a collective exhibition in Tivoli (RM), on purpose with no explanations, only paintings and titles, and realised that somehow the same message went out to most spectators, like they were all connected ancestrally. Most of my early works were sold and I had to become aware of what I was really doing.