Biography

Rocco Normanno was born in the province of Lecce in 1974. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He currently lives and works in Tuscany.

Art

The beginning of his research has its roots in the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, who dogmatically affirms: “You will make the figures in such an act which is sufficient to demonstrate what the figure has in his soul; otherwise your painting will not be laudable”.

Rocco Normanno has repeatedly reiterated his predilection for great figurative painting, believing that all the experiences lived by a man in the course of his existence sediment in the memory to the point of building the individual, until his face and expression are modified, so as to allow the emergence of the image of oneself, in a biunivocal correspondence between interiority and exteriority.

It is in the meticulous rendering of the objects and characters represented, it is in the poetics of the light-shadow correlation − so evident in his works − it is in the interpretation of the sacred, biblical, allegorical events as simply human facts, eliminating any reference to the prefixed patterns, but rather inventing a particular repertoire, it is in such context that we must speak of Normanno as the main representative of a new Realism and a new Renaissance, exactly as, about four hundred years ago, we spoke of Caravaggio, witness of two different traditions: the Lombard Realism and the Venetian Renaissance.

In the sometimes repetitive panorama of contemporary art, Rocco Normanno stands out as an artist who freely expresses himself with an autonomous language, but who refers to Caravaggio’s poetics by painting ordinary people, making them become great interpreters of biblical or mythological themes revisited in own way.

Just as in Caravaggio’s works, Normanno faces his stories immersing them in the reality of our time, in the contemporaneity, with characters depicted in modern clothes. And light is the characterising element of the whole work, whether it be a still life, whether they be family or individual portraits, they are all called to interpret complex themes such as the “Departure for Bethlehem””, the “Saint Thomas”, the “Narcisuss”…

Normanno’s strength therefore consists in the magical power to pictorially transmit his complex and articulated intellectuality, but also in his extraordinary ability to observe and represent the surrounding reality. His works convey contrasting but complementary sensations, such as the immobility of suspended pain − almost crystallized in a sort of eternal perfection − and the urge of pathos, a movement that we can feel almost physically.

In Normanno’s work everything is clear, but everything is subject to interpretation in a lucid vision of the secrets of life; an agnostic vision but, perhaps for this very reason, a mystical one as well.