ART CITIES: Hong Kong-Pietro Roccasalva

The works by Pietro Roccasalva reveal the artist’s profound commitment to challenge the power of painting through a vocabulary that mixes different techniques and references, using lexicon from the classical tradition and high cultural references. The artist’s painting ability becomes an extraordinary means of connecting concepts and visions, and remains the key element of a poetic that combines different languages and practices.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Massimodecarlo Gallery Arhive

The exhibition “Recent Paintings” marks Pietro Roccasalva’s highly anticipated debut solo show in Asia. Centred around his latest creations the exhibition present new pieces from his acclaimed series, “La Sposa Occidentale” and “Just Married Machine”. Roccasalva, a maestro of the enigmatic, weaves together intricate symbols, drawing profound inspiration from literature, cinema, philosophy, and our collective imagination. The resulting artistic repertoire manifests as a complex vernacular and deeply personal iconography. While the exhibited works are indeed recent, they are inseparable from the artist’s ongoing exploration, experimentation, and scholarly pursuits, which have been unfolding over the course of two decades. Pietro Roccasalva’s work revolves around painting as a specific field of action, even when it involves the use of other media, which are always integrated into the process that precedes and follows the creation of a painterly image. The formal and conceptual research that the artist has been engaged in over the last twenty years covers a broad spectrum, in which painting intersects with other media such as sculpture, photography, video and performance, a mingling of genres that however always begins and ends in painting. With multiple references ranging from everyday life to art history, from cinema, literature and philosophy to digital and media culture, Roccasalva has developed a vast iconographic repertoire made up of characters, objects and architectural structures, and a personal lexicon that combines the most traditional painting genres and techniques with recent digital practices.

Photo: Pietro Roccasalva, Untitled (Giocondità IX), 2021, Oil on canvas, 74 × 94.8 × 2.8 cm, 29 1/8 × 37 1/3 × 1 1/8 inches, © Pietro Roccasalva, Courtesy the artist and Massimodecarlo Gallery

Info: Massimodecarlo Gallery, Shop 03-205A & 205B & 206, Second Floor, Barrack Block, Tai Kwun,, No. 10 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 31/8- , Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:30-19:00, https://massimodecarlo.com/