Gabriele Talarico | Bologna ITALY

I was born in Catanzaro on 26 September 1974.

Once I had finished artistic high school, I started out on a series of instinctively “strange” projects that had nothing to do with either painting or my current research. I studied and performed in a theatre workshop and painted walls on the streets, building up a collection of police charges and empty spray cans; acts that were considered nothing other than total madness in the late 1980s in my town.

I worked marble in my mother’s studio, producing everything that was commissioned without understanding how or why it was so easy for me to split and model those stones. This was followed by various other insignificant artistic initiatives until 1992, when wild, bloody events related to life on the street forced me to leave Catanzaro and set out on the real journey to discover myself. Forever.

After trying to enrol at the Academy of Fine Art on Via Ripetta in Rome, I gave up on artistic training and studied film in the Arts Faculty of the city’s Sapienza University. From there I went through countless jobs, breaks and returns to study: I worked as a scenographer in Tunisia, a manual worker, a dish washer, a driver, an extra, a street portrait artist, a street cleaner and in other roles still until the fortuitous and, in my opinion, wonderful artistic collaboration (audiovisual performances and installations) with the resident group of the Link Project in Bologna.

With Link, in addition to distorted electro music training, I experienced Light, those marvellous effects that pushed me instinctively and without strict logic towards inverted figurative painting: reverse images, eyes and dark sides blazing out light... it was the start of my oil on canvas figurative photographic negative painting. I started painting to earn a living: I preferred to fill walls and canvases for a little cash rather than lorries with fruit and vegetables or pallet trucks with foodstuffs in exchange for monthly pay and an annual bonus. Then painting stole my heart and my senses... and while it should be made clear that I still do not know what rabbit-skin glue is or how to tighten a canvas manually, I have continued and indeed never stopped working and looking for myself through colour and the light images that fill my thoughts before I start each painting. So, like many of my fellow artists, I am self-taught. This was out of necessity in many respects and the need to get away in others. I have lived and worked in Bologna for a number of years and everything that you come across on this site belongs to an irrational side of my personality that, like certain others, I will never understand.