Ostinato

Francesca Minini presents Ostinato, a solo exhibition by Roberto de Pinto, a body of work exploring the persistence of the painterly gesture and the artist’s multiple identities. Like a musical ostinato, a repeated and varied motif, de Pinto’s work revolves around a recurring alter ego, depicted in figures and faces that, while evoking the artist’s own features, become autonomous characters, suspended between novelistic narrative and Pirandellian theater.

The evolution of his painting is evident: from his early graphic works emerges now a richer color palette, combined with encaustic and oil, giving the surfaces an epidermal, sculptural, and theatrical effect. The figures, isolated against dark backgrounds, gain volumetric solidity and stage presence, almost emerging from a nocturnal scene.

A new chapter is marked by the Capricci, developed from a performance in which the artist, covered in cut-out shapes, danced and sang, transforming the cut-outs into an alphabet of possible identities. From these elements arise collages and compositions that engage in dialogue with the Rococo painting of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau, where frivolity and introspection intertwine.

The relationship between artist and character reaches its peak in the Passo a Due: the figures become sensual, flirtatious with intensity, while simultaneously maintaining an exclusive intimacy with the painter. The bodies are adorned with flowers, painted with botanical care and rigorous attention, while poetic fragments from Neruda, Eliot, or Cavaf, sometimes incorporated as speech balloons, amplify the dialogue between eros, spirit, and imagination. Ostinato thus becomes an exploration of the persistence of the creative gesture, the seduction of detail, and the poetry that permeates our lives, uniting body, soul, and painting in an endless visual and emotional dance.