Ecce Homo II Print

I was born in Castellon, Spain, in 1954 and live in Italy since 1976. Art historian, I'm a professor at the University of the Holy Cross in Rome. As an artist, I tried to develop a contemplative painting through a conceptual approach to color and shape. Currently I life and work in Milan. *** I grew up with a pencil in hand. I drew everything, copied everything. I learned how to make papier-mâché and shaped my own puppets. In college I met artsy and protesters along with some true artist. I did not attend the Art School. Two university degrees and a doctorate in History of Art could be enough. However I was apprenticed to the Spanish painter Salvador Perez, who taught me a painting on the border with lyric poetry. The landscape has been my obsession for years. I defined myself contemplative of nature and outside that vision everything seemed to me bizarre and rarefied. One day I discovered that I was actually exploring the human soul. The landscape had become a symbolic code for what in truth I investigated. So I raised my moorings and built a poetic late pop landscapes with large fields of bright colors. The exhibition of 1999 at the Museum of St. Ambrose in Milan was a great success, but I became paralyzed. Disgusted by my own work I spent nine years without painting. Or almost. Only thanks to the support of my friend artist Davide Coltro I recovered slowly. Today I continue to delve into the heart of man by coding each time new symbols. And I know that the painting will never die because manually trace the signs is natural to man action.