Roberto Rocchi

Roberto Rocchi was born in 1962 at Carrara, Italy, where he attended arts college and the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts under Master Floriano Bodini. In Carrara he set up a sculpure studio specialising in marble, bronze and iron works.

From 1995 he has been a lecturer of sculpture at the Academies of Naples, Milan, Bologna, Sassari, Macerata and Foggia. From 1982 he has attended numerous national and international exhibitions with exhibits inprivate and public collections in various countries including Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the USA.

As from the first half of the '90s, Rocchi's work focussed with lucid coherence on a single specific set of problems, namely the attainment of complex relationships between different and antithetical propositions - plasticity and levity, abstraction and concreteness, strength and fragility, stiffness and suppleness, stillness and movement, memory and immanence. Thus, for Rocchi the basic question for modern sculpure in its entirety, the relationship matter-shape-space-time is to be seen in terms of neither antithesis nor synthesis, but rather of reciprocal interaction of one with the other.

Rocchi's work progresses from the whole body to torsos, busts, stomacs, breasts, to arrive at the very parts of the human body which hide pure sentiments. Not at all the mind, rarely the faces, but indeed love. Love is captured in metaphor in the turgid breasts of the vergins, in the torsos of men, rising as protective shields, in women's bosoms, in slender busts stretched with desire. Passion, eroticism, tenderness.