Michele Tocca

B. 1983, Subiaco, Rome, Italy
Lives and works in Rome

He studied in Italy, Belgium and the UK, where he completed an MA, Painting, at the Royal College of Art, London (2011). His painting revolves around observations and direct execution onsite as ways to measure the distances between process and metaphor, naturalism and its paradoxes, time and history. Working from life, indoors and outdoors, his paintings seek for a reciprocal actuality between the making of a piece and physical phenomena, circumstances. An identification through which paint each time becomes rain, stain, a wall, mud, a jacket in an ongoing overlapping of sensorial immediacy and the spontaneous re-presenting of aesthetical inquiries and visual archetypes.

Recent exhibitions include: Repoussoir, GAM, Turin 2023 (solo; upcoming); Chiara Camoni. Forra, fiorame, fogliame, IUNO, Rome 2022; Trattare l’aria, Ipercorpo, Extrart, Forlì 2022; Verticale terra, Sara Zanin, Rome 2021 (two-person exhibition); Le realtà ordinarie, Palazzo de’ Toschi, Bologna 2020; Painting Project, Praksis, LNM, Oslo 2019; Reality, Hickster Projects, San Giovanni d’Asso, Siena 2019 (two-person exhibition); Belvedere, Caffè Internazionale, Palermo 2018 (solo).

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