Rosso, carnival characters & taboos

Rosso’s paintings are metaphors of contemporary society, born out of a reflection on the irony and conundrums of the human condition. Her canvasses are often populated with a colourful mixture of carnivalesque characters impersonating feelings, fears, themes and taboos commonly experienced.

Visibly influenced by a variety of genres spanning from Old Renaissance Masters to Street art, her style revisits and combines traditional academic techniques and compositions with quirky imagery and symbols mostly drawn from contemporary urban folklore.

The intriguing, often ambiguous characters of her paintings seem to live in between an objective space and an imaginary, timeless world made up of dreams, childhood memories and pure fantasies. In this sense, her work can be described as ‘transitional’ realist, denoting this blurring of edges in between reality and fantasy.

BIO

Born in Sicily (1978), she moved to London in 2004 to finish her academic studies in international relations and human rights followed by a few years working in marketing and advertising. Primarily self-taught, she trained briefly at the Prince Drawing School and at LARA (London Atelier of Representational Art) before embarking on a full time professional painting career in 2014.

Rosso is the winner of the Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize 2017 , and the Emerald Winter Pride Arts Award 2016.
Rosso
July 1, 2017

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