ROBERTO CARACCIOLO
Born in New York and based in Rome, Caracciolo has worked for forty years
from geometric abstraction, through open-air paintings of plum trees, to the latest choreographed gestures,
all of it ruled by rigor and coherence, with a dreamlike poetry that keeps time like music
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ARTIST BIO
Roberto Caracciolo (b. New York, 1960) (b. New York, 1960) is an Italian and American painter. He studied at the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, the Istituto d’Arte di Urbino and the New York Studio School, and worked as assistant set designer to Dante Ferretti from 1982 to 1984. His first solo show was at Galleria Alberto Weber, Turin, in 1986, and he has continued to exhibit in Europe and the United States over the last forty years.
In New York he showed with André Emmerich Gallery between 1990 and 1993, and with Loretta Howard Gallery in 2011, 2018 and 2021. The critic and curator Barbara Rose wrote on his work for the Weber and Emmerich catalogues and included him in two group exhibitions she curated, in Perugia in 1997 and at the Reggia di Caserta in 2018.
His painting has ranged from rigorous geometric abstraction to watercolors and oils of a red-leaved plum tree observed near the Colosseum and, in the works of the last few years, to gestures turned about a fixed center. From 2007 to 2010 he was Arts Liaison at the American Academy in Rome, where he curated Betty Woodman’s 2010 solo exhibition. He lives and works in Rome, where he has taught drawing at Temple University Rome since 2007 and at John Cabot University since 2016.
ABOUT THE WORK
Roberto Caracciolo’s recent paintings can be likened to a draftsman’s compass fitted with a loaded brush in place of the pencil. Its fixed foot is a point on the canvas, sometimes ringed by a pencil circle beneath the paint, sometimes set against a seam or an orange guide line. From that point the brush turns, dragging a ragged edge and shedding drips, and stops mid-motion. The arcs that remain, black, olive, crimson or gold, carry the full pressure of the sweep, while paler ghosts of earlier passes surface from below.
Caracciolo explores what a gesture can hold when the rigor moves from the vertical and horizontal construction of the geometric paintings he showed in New York in the 1990s into the set-up. The conditions are fixed before the first stroke; after it, the paint takes over, dripping, pooling, tearing at its own edge. Stand where the needle would stand, follow one arc outward to its ragged end, and let your eye close the circle the paint leaves open.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My gestures are born from emotional condition, subtle movements of one’s own inner vibrations. And the gesture is tied to what my arm wants to do, to the freedom it demands. To the choreographed movement of my body. The small paintings are done sitting down, at arm’s length, in an intimate, limited space, but the big paintings are a full-bodied dance.
PRESENTED AT ARCO GALLERY
Exhibitions: GESTURES, INTERRUPTED (2026) Thematic focus: Abstract Art
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