Agostino Rocco. fashionable/questionable
Agostino Rocco was born in Padua, where he lives and works. From a very young age, he studied the work of the Tuscan Renaissance masters of the Flemish contemporaries and the fortunate 17th century season of the French masters, all of whom became a constant reference and source of inspiration for his work.
Self-taught, he immediately defined the perimeter of his poetics, a figurative painting that starting from traditional techniques has over time elaborated and bent to his own research ranging from the use of photography to drawing, oil on paper, canvas and wood.
Agostino Rocco is familiar with ancient art, the portraits of the Renaissance masters, the Flemish and French masters, and has carefully studied their light, colour, matter, and the meticulous control of the brushstroke.
But Agostino Rocco does not like to copy, he does not like to repeat, he likes to revive the very life of art in the faces of his models.
In the series of ‘fashionable/questionable’ portraits, the artist drew inspiration from the photos of boys and girls who animate the photographic sets of advertising and the catwalks of fashion shows, he has deformed their features, changed their proportions, the colour of their skin, sometimes accentuated their small imperfections as if to emphasise their fears and obsessions, at other times he has exalted their brazen beauty and desires.
Rare are the hints of fashion, colour profiles for clothes of which we do not know the weave of the fabric, the pattern design, the detail of a stitching or a button.
Almost all of them are small, set in frames like cameos, portraits to be observed very closely to discover the pattern of a dishevelled hair, a beard hair that has escaped the razor, the trace of a bruise, a small stain of paint soiling the phalanx of a finger.
