Biography

Born in Catanzaro in 1972.

Studies in the Artistic High School of Catanzaro where he obtains his degree in 1990.

Attends the Academy of Fine Arts “Raffello Sanzio” in Urbino, receiving a Bachelor’s degree in painting in 1995.
Title of the thesis: “The Italian Transavanguardia.”

From an early age starts to draw his friends’ and teachers’ faces in pencil and ball point pen.
During his adolescence he develops a passion for the drawings of the Italian Renaissance, especially those of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael.
Later his interest is focused on Surrealism and he falls in love with Dalí’s painting.
During his high school studies, under the guide of Professor Francesco Mete, his interest moves towards a more profound conception of drawing and he starts a more personal research of different artistic techniques.
At the Academy of Fine Arts, the interaction with his teacher Omar Galliani, an anachronist painter, allows him to glimpse at the possibility of rereading Classical art from a contemporary perspective.
He starts to experiment with various pictorial techniques and ends by privileging painting in oils.

Also passionate about music, he plays the drums and in the summer of 1993, with his brother Valerio and his friends Antonello and Marco, forms the group “Amici d’estate.”

Their success is reviewed in the section “Music and Entertainment” of the newspaper “Reportage,” in Lamezia Terme.
The music played by the group is considered a combination of melodic Italian style rock and abrasive American hard rock.
The teacher Michele Curcio, a famous folk-song composer, says of them: “They are young men with a sure future, gifted with musical talent.”

Since 1998 he lives in Bologna.

Studies jazz drums.

In the summers of 2001 and 2002, with the group “Contropelo,” made up of his brothers Valerio and Francesco, his cousin Mino and his friends Laura, Valentino and Luciano, he participates in musical shows in the piazze of several towns in Calabria and in assorted night clubs.

The encounter with the artist Alessandro Giusberti, during his stay in Bologna, reawakens in him the profound interest towards the 17th century’s realist painters: Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Franz Hals, which leads him to undertake a stylistic research of portraiture based on the study of such artists.