Pietro Roccasalva. Chi è che ride

Texts by Ara H. Merjian and Flavia Frigeri, with a foreword by Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati, Chi è che ride presents and reconstructs some fundamental nuclei of Pietro Roccasalva’s production through fifty works from the late 1990s to today, including new and previously unpublished pieces from the artist’s studio and public and private collections.

The formal and conceptual research that Roccasalva has carried out over the last twenty years intersects his pictorial practice with other expressive means such as sculpture, photography, video, and performance, all under the banner of linguistic contamination. Through a plurality of references, Roccasalva has developed a vast iconographic repertoire. His characters, objects, architectures, and peculiar vocabulary reflect on the crisis of the subject, and by extension crises of identity, image, and form.

This publication highlights connections and references across Roccasalva’s myriad themes, iconographies, techniques, and languages, accompanied by photographic documentation of the exhibition. An essay by art historian Ara H. Merjian, professor at New York University, retraces Roccasalva’s production against the backdrop of twentieth-century art history, and an essay by Flavia Frigeri, curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, reads the work through temporal, spatial, and narrative slippage.