Italian artist, Raffaele Rossi, combines fresco and mixed-media techniques to make his delicate and allusive paintings. His images are reminiscent of the vestigial markings and mysterious tracings of antique and ancient cultures. There is a sense that these pictures have been excavated out of a remarkably rich deposit from the classical past.
These pictures show the artist to be an inveterate agitator of his chosen medium. They are busy with activity; alive with mark, stain, sgraffito, smear and scumble. He uses a rich and contrasting palette of earth hues and vibrant, iridescent colour. Over a creamy ochre ground, he lays down washes and glazes of rich, intense hues: emerald greens, hot scarlets, tangerine oranges, saturated ultramarines and sapphire blues. These are the Mediterranean keynotes for his small-scale stagings. Into these planes and fields, he draws archetypal images of animals, schematic figures and simple objects, which operate as symbols taking part in some arcane, and possibly mythical, story.
The artist’s subjects are non-specific and generic in form. They act as ciphers and signs, indicators of universally understood representations. The landscapes in which they operate are more definite; some are actual locations, which perhaps have personal significance. Rossi shows his incidents, encounters and juxtapositions happening in real places. He is bringing the mythical world into the particular and contemporary, showing the coexistence of one perceived reality within another.
The painter makes clearly stated connections to the art of the past. He uses a method which owes much to antiquity. Fresco and panel-painting would be entirely familiar to the artists and artisans of ancient Greece and Rome. They are techniques which have endured, and maintain a corporeal link back through time, forming connections in a chain of cultural production. Raffaele Rossi lays claim to such a connection with these finely-wrought and evocative paintings.
