Dario Carratta

The centre of Rome is so big that there’s always something new to discover and when this includes cultural experiences, so much the better.

The Richter Fine Art gallery opened a few months ago, a short distance from Castel Sant’Angelo, in Vicolo del Curato no. 3, a side street off via dei Coronari.

This contemporary art gallery is the brainchild of Tommaso Richter, a thirty year old art lover and collector, who set up the gallery by renovating an old blacksmith’s workshop next door to his family’s antiques showroom: an almost physiological continuation of the business, from antique art through to the present time.

Right from the beginning Tommaso Richter defined the direction of the gallery, which he presents as a “laboratory” for experimentation with the languages of painting and the possibilities it offers, as testified by the collective exhibition Non amo che le rose che non colsi (October-December 2016); the first solo exhibition in Rome by the Iranian artist Zanbagh Lotfi È stato forse ieri (February-March 2017); the solo exhibition by Elena Bellantoni DreamEscape (April-May 2017) and the solo exhibition by Dario Carratta Sniff my leather jacket currently in progress.

After Sergio Raggio we talk about un artist: Dario Carratta (Gallipoli, 1988), the youngest of the gallery’s artists, uses painting to transfer dystopian images onto canvas, populated by characters on the borderline between the physical nature of the real world and the evanescence of dreams.

With their toxic and extremely fascinating flavour, Carratta’s paintings have a dreamlike quality, more troubled rather than idyllic, dominated by a gloomy atmosphere that seems to evoke an existentialism akin to the grunge culture. The characters that appear in Carratta’s canvases are fragile human figures, losers with a shabby humble attitude, people on the fringe.

The artist spies on the protagonists of his works portraying them in disturbing or magic or reserved moments: a voyeur who, out of modesty or due to fear, observes in silence, without breaking the tension of these fleeting and ecstatic visions.

The exhibition occupies two floors: on the first floor lay dozens of works – paintings on canvas and creations on paper – are exhibited on the main wall of the gallery, a window overlooking an enormous condo and alone, in a less prominent position on the side wall, a small self-portrait of the artist. The floor below features a life-size puppet called Sam which, with a concentrated expression and equipped with the inevitable Nike trainers, looks at an exotic landscape that doesn’t exist, like him.

Bio artist

Dario Carratta was born in Gallipoli in 1988 and obtained his diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He uses painting to transfer onto canvas dystopian and disturbing images of characters on the borderline between physical reality and the evanescence of dreams. His main exhibition projects include: Non amo che le rose che non colsi, (Richter Fine Art, 2016); The Grass Grows (74 Riehenstrasse, Basle, 2014); The Celeste Choice (Format Gallery, Milan, 2014); Petty Theft (Launch F18 Gallery, New York, 2013); Collateral Orbits (Allegranomad Gallery, Bucharest, 2013); Distopie (26cc, Rome, 2013); Flash Over (Alessandri Gallery, Rome, 2012).

Website / Fb account
tommaso.richter.85@gmail.com