The solo exhibition of Rosario Oliva is open to visitors at the Benedetto Robazza Museum in Rocca Priora until June 11, 2022.
Rosario Oliva: the artist
Rosario Oliva was born in 1965 in Naples. Here, he attended the art institute and then enrolled at IED in Rome, specializing in the field of illustration.
In Rome, he began working as an illustrator for major advertising agencies. Since 1997, he has dedicated himself to digital art in its many forms. He is currently the director of Pixelheads and a teacher at NABA.
Recently, he felt the need to get his hands dirty with colors again: this is how he started painting once more.
This is how the exhibition “Rosario Oliva: a meeting between figurativism and abstraction” was born, structured in two distinct sections where one can admire paintings on canvas, oils on panel, and drawings, the result of the artist’s free pictorial digression through portraits, landscapes, and “images of contemporaneity.”
The “images of contemporaneity”: society and social networks
In the first section of the solo exhibition by Rosario Oliva, set up in the main hall of the Benedetto Robazza Museum, one can admire the paintings related to social networks. Here are gathered all those works that represent contemporary society as a slave and subservient to digital and social tools, which Oliva seems to paint almost as if they were photographic snapshots, “images of contemporaneity.”
These are at the center of Rosario Oliva’s artistic work: the characters appear as confused presences. After all, they are not real people but symbols of the entire society whose identity is obscured by the tools they hold. Nothing remains of their human identity; they are painted naked both in appearance and in soul.
They only have a smartphone, from which they receive notifications. Nothing else.
Portraits and Landscapes: Between Characterization and Evanescence
The second section of the exhibition is dedicated to portraits and landscapes.
Portraits stand as the exact opposite of images of contemporaneity.
If these were blurred, the portraits on the contrary are well-defined. Made both in acrylic and oil on canvas as well as in charcoal on paper, they recall in technique – especially in the brushstrokes – the art of Toulouse-Lautrec.
The landscapes are positioned midway compared to the previous works.
Rosario Oliva paints both well-defined scenes on large canvases and more hinted and sketched panoramas on smaller canvases.
The peculiar characteristic of the landscapes is undoubtedly the excessive use of paint by the artist to simulate a dripping effect at the bottom edge of the canvas.
The most passionate art lovers may find a reference to the art of Jackson Pollock, the American artist famous for this particular use of color.
Rosario Oliva in some of his landscapes, thanks to this exaggerated dripping, wants to simulate an effect of incompleteness in the work, thus leaving the viewer the freedom to complete the artwork in their own mind.
The solo exhibition of Rosario Oliva at the Benedetto Robazza Museum is an unmissable opportunity to delve deeper into and better understand the art of the Neapolitan artist.
