Roberto Ferri (born 1978) is an Italian artist and painter from Taranto, Italy, who is deeply inspired by Baroque painters (Caravaggio in particular) and other old masters of Romanticism, the Academy, and Symbolism.
Ferri graduated from the Liceo Artistico Lisippo Taranto in 1996, a local art school in his hometown. He began to study painting on his own and moved to Rome in 1999, to increase research on ancient painting, beginning at the end of the 16th century, in particular. In 2006, he graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
Ferri’s painting is strongly influenced by the Caravaggio, neoclassical and pre-Raffaellites style. In his work you can sometimes notice elements of photographic hyperrealism. The lesson of the great artists of the past is critical technically, compositively, coloristically, but also thematically, especially about the dreamy aspect of the Eighteenth Century.
This cultural baggage stands as the basis from which The artist moves conceptually to give life to contemporary works, often disturbing. Ferri makes visible in his works an inner conflict between good and evil, giving shape to thought, idea, feeling or emotion. In its symbolic language bodies are the depiction of the soul: perfect if pure, deformed if corrupt or lost.
As the artist explains in an interview, "demons also represent daily restlessness, they are vicissitudes and life experiences seen through the filter of painting and therefore take on a different form."
That is what demonic forms, that deforms the holiness of the body, are actually also deformations of the spirit. The surreal aspect is therefore connected to the deformation of the soul.
Often present in his works elements of wrought iron, such as astrolabes, measuring instruments that take on a different function, almost of control: they represent the rational part that tries to control deformations or of the spirit, even in a painful way.
Ferri's works, immersed in a mysterious and caravaggiesque atmosphere, tell an inner world born out of sudden inspirations or night visions.
