Pietro Roccasalva

The Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati presents a solo exhibition – the first in a Swiss institution – of the Italian artist Pietro Roccasalva (b. 1970, lives and works in Milan). The aim of the project is to present and reconstruct several core foundations of the artist’s recent production in an exhibition narrative in which works especially conceived for the event are flanked by a selection drawn from various series of existing artworks. Roccasalva’s work is related to painting as a specific field of action, even when it employs other media, such as sculpture, installation, video and tableau vivant, which remain an integral part of the process that precedes and follows the creation of a painted image. Drawing on a wide array of references taken from areas ranging from everyday life to art history, Roccasalva has devised a diversified iconographic repertoire of characters, objects and architecture that coexist in a visionary and highly imaginative universe. The exhibition traces different aspects of his production, highlighting the links and constant cross-references between subjects, techniques and languages, in a complex and coherent artistic quest that challenges and defies the language of painting through a highly personal vocabulary in which the most traditional pictorial technique encounters the latest digital ones.