Pietro Roccasalva

Pietro Roccasalva was born in Modica in 1970. After moving to chaotic Milan, he graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. In 2002, he participated in the Visual Arts Course at the Antonio Ratti Foundation in Como, where he studied under Giulio Paolini, a key figure in the Arte Povera movement.

Using various media such as sculpture, video, performance, and digital reproduction, Roccasalva creates tableau vivant within a space. Captured in photographs, these tableaux serve as the foundation for a painting that will be featured in the subsequent exhibition, generating further photographic material for the next painting, and so on. This process narrates a story that seemingly has no end. The artist states, "These are a series of projects in which one or more paintings conceptualize a situation; what arises from this, and what results in various exhibition contexts, can be defined as a situational artwork."

His works feature women with seemingly angelic faces, men with demonic gazes, still lifes created with living bodies, church domes transformed into juicers, owls disguised as parrots, and skull-shaped bread. These are the protagonists that animate the theatrical "staged scenes" of a Sicilian painter who dreamed of becoming a football player as a child. When asked how painting can survive in the face of new technologies, he responds, "It survives just like an athletics race or a football match. It is an immediate performance, like any other physiological need."