My name is Roberto Russo (latigreassenza) and I was born in 1961 in Cattolica, Italy, but since I was a child I live in Pesaro. Although my paintings are understood in the genre of abstract expressionism for me they are stages of a research that I do about myself by exploring concepts and materials, beyond genres and classifications. Rather than abstractionism, it seems to me to do portraiture. Only that I portray figures, faces, physiognomies of creatures in nuce, in formation. Sometimes I think that my works represent life itself at the moment of conception: they are snapshots of molecules scattered throughout the universe, lumps of essences floating in space and time before being conceived ontologically. I realize how all this can be called abstract expressionism, conceptual painting, etc., because such is what emerges, the final evidence, but I like to simply portray glows of existences that arise from shadows, subliminal landscapes formed by figures that exploded or in aggregation. Something nascent, a presence that is not yet there but that could be there, that is going to be or, why not, that there has been.
Technically I work on canvases that I prepare with layers of plaster and then apply the color on it. I use acrylic paints and spray paint (rarely oil, pencils and wax) and sometimes I mix them with plaster, sometimes I use them pure. I paint on medium and fine grain canvases, preferably medium to large in size; for the cycle of works at the end of 2022, including a quadritic, I used for example canvases of dimensions 60 x 120 and 50 x 100. I also like to work on paper, but with heavy weight and on wood, but I prefer these in smaller sizes. I first prepare the canvases with plaster and stucco to obtain a thickness on which the color can lie so as to create material effects, reflections, play of light and shadow. The color itself is matter and I like to highlight its three-dimensional effect. Even when I use spray paint, which by its nature does not entail thick material effects, I look for three-dimensionality through the contrast between fluorescent and non-fluorescent colors, between metallic reflections (silver gold bronze) and opaque color. I also use spray paint directly on black and white plasters that are still fresh. I also look for reflections and shadow games in two-dimensional works, in those not ‘prepared’ with the material thickness. But even in these I look for the breakthrough of space, depth. In the works of early 2022, both those with a black background and those with a white background, I used dynamic drip techniques and lashing of color, while in the cycle of works at the end of 2022 I dedicated myself to the reflections and contrasts of white and black in all their “colorful” shades. In the action of painting I give space to my performative side more rock and glam (and that comes to me from being a musician): for this reason the final act, the application of color after the long sedimentation of the funds, I always conceive it in a very fast and definitive way. For me the creative gesture is bodily, instantaneous, mental and gestural together: it is a thought without thinking, intuitive, an unguided gesture that comes from the depths. What matters to me is to bring to the canvas the continuous play between presence and absence, between expression and silence; the vibration and the clash of light and shadow, form and essence. For me, life, like art, is an expression of the Void, in the Zen sense of the realm of possibility and being.
My training is literary: I am a PhD in Italian literature; I have published poetry, poetry in prose, essays and translations. As a musician I have released records with the glam rock group "The Boohoos" (1986/1989) of which I told the events in a book ("Too much too Boohoos", Crac Edizioni) and I am still active on the main platforms. I recently released a double CD of random and rumorist electro-concrete music together with friends Giovanni Tommaso Garattoni and Pierangelo Caforio with the project ‘Tecno Zaclen / Zac Tum Tum’.