Biography
Virgilio was born in 1967 in La Spezia. He is a self-taught artist. When he was a teenager, he attended Italian museums–Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence above all–where he learned the painting technique from the old masters. At the beginning of the Nineties, he began to receive commissions from private buyers and sometimes from the Church. The Passionist Friars Order asked him to realize a series of paintings about The Old and The New Testament. After living in the United States during the mid-Nineties, he decided to go back to Italy, where he worked frequently for private buyers. At the same time, he began a path of study and research that finally led him to new ways of artistical expression: photography, video, sculpture, and installation art.
He studied, almost obsessively, Rembrandt, Duchamp, and McLuhan. The deep study of these three masters–“a triptych of delights” as Virgilio describes them–led him to new topics such as the role of the human being in the contemporary society, the strong influence of social structures, and the power of technology.
Virgilio combines a traditional painting technique with extremely current topics. Irony is Virgilio’s peculiar sign, wisely used to induce critical thinking in his audience.
In the summer of 2000, Virgilio participated in an art exhibition with a much-discussed piece that he was finally forced to remove. In that occasion, he was noticed by the writer Giorgio Soavi who commissioned his portrait and later became Virgilio’s good friend. In 2003, the artist began to work with the Forni Gallery in Bologna, and he participated in several art expos in Italy and abroad. He was chosen by Philippe Daverio for variuos art projects.
Virgilio currently lives and works in Italy, in Sarzana, nearby La Spezia.
