ROBERTO CARACCIOLO: GESTURES, INTERRUPTED
Contemporary Painting Exhibition
Rendered show in a setting inspired by Arco's gallery in SoHo.
Select a work to open its page.
PRESENTATION
Arco Gallery presents Gestures, Interrupted, an exhibition of eighteen recent oil paintings by Roberto Caracciolo, made in Rome between 2022 and 2026. In each work a loaded brush turns about a fixed point and ends mid-motion: arcs, loops and fans in black, olive, crimson and gold, with paler ghosts of earlier passes beneath. The paintings run from twelve-inch squares to canvases over seven feet high. Before each stroke Caracciolo sets the conditions, a fixed center, sometimes a circle drawn beneath the paint, in several works a seam. The rigor of the geometric paintings he showed in New York in the 1990s has moved into that set-up. What the viewer meets is the stroke at the moment it stops.
FOREWORD
I visit Roberto’s studio every year when I go to Rome. I have always admired his work: its passion, coherence and rigor, but also its dreamlike poetry and humor. For years his paintings were built on grids. Then came the Prunus, and after it the controlled gestures. I was disconcerted, and it took me some time to understand.
I visit Roberto’s studio every year when I go to Rome. I have always admired his work: its passion, coherence and rigor, but also its dreamlike poetry and humor. For years his paintings were built on grids. Then came the Prunus, and after it the controlled gestures. I was disconcerted, and it took me some time to understand.
What I had taken for a break was the same rigor moved elsewhere. Roberto sets the conditions before each stroke: a fixed center, sometimes a circle drawn beneath the paint, in several canvases a seam. Then a loaded brush turns about that center, drags, drips, and stops mid-motion exactly where he decides. The stop is where the painting happens. Everything the paint has already done stands, and the arc that would have completed the circle does not exist. The grid is gone; its vertical survives as the seam, and its rigor now governs the set-up and the stop.
ARTIST BIO
Roberto Caracciolo
(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.
Roberto Caracciolo
(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.
Selected One Person Exhibitions
2023 Segnare il tempo [Marking Time], Palazzo Comunale, Todi, Italy
2021 A Few Changes for a New Start, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, NY
2018 Something Quiet, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, NY
2017 Cercando fiori mai visti [Looking for Flowers Never Seen], Intragallery, Naples, Italy
2014 Prunus, UNU, Todi, Italy
2011 Seeing Red: a Decade of Work, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, NY
2007 Sei Meditazioni [Six Meditations], Limonaia of Villa La Pietra, Florence, Italy
2006 Roma razionalista [Rationalist Rome], Galleria AAM, Rome, Italy
2004 Galerie Blancpain Stepczynski, Geneva, Switzerland
1998 Earl McGrath Gallery, New York, NY
1995 Galerie Alessandro Vivas, Paris, France
1993 André Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY
1991 André Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY
1990 André Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY
1990 Galleria Valeria Belvedere, Milan, Italy
1989 Collages and Drawings by Roberto Caracciolo and Chuck Dugan, Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston, TX
1986 Galleria Alberto Weber, Turin, Italy
Selected Group Exhibitions
2024 In successione: la serie come diagramma temporale [In Succession: The Series as Temporal Diagram], A.A.M. Architettura Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy
2021 The Red Show, James Barron Art, Kent, CT
2019 Inauguration of the Colección Roberto Polo, Centro de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo, Spain
2018 Painting After Postmodernism, curated by Barbara Rose, Reggia di Caserta, Caserta, Italy
2016 Sette Opere per la Misericordia [Seven Works of Mercy], Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples, Italy
2005 XIV Quadriennale, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy
2003 Le figure mancanti [The Missing Figures], curated by Giovanni Maria Accame, Fondazione Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin, Italy
1998 Pittura aniconica [Aniconic Painting], Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy
1997 New York – New Generation, curated by Barbara Rose, Palazzo della Penna, Perugia, Italy
1993 A Grand Tour, Swiss Institute, New York, NY
1993 Geometric Abstraction, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY
1992 Drawing in Black and White, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY