Roberto del Frate
Italian artist fromVenice, Italy,
#surreal & #soft goth art oriented, working also on #comicart & #digitalart.
He has been making art for over three decades. His paitings encompass different styles and subjects matter. For his works, he uses a mixture of acrylic and oil, crayon, charcoal, exploring also the innovative digital techniques.
Roberto del Frate (b. 1960, Venice, Italy) lives and works in Trieste (Italy) where he has his artistic residency at Atelier Home Gallery.
The Series:
HMon
The project dates back to 2000, with an introduction to digital design through Wacom tablets and the experimentation of traditional digital \ hybrid techniques.
Fundamentally, the HMon are part of an immense cosmogony made up of creatures of all kinds who have in common only their their human part (H, is precisely for "Human").
They vary in size and type, as well as in countless variations based on sexual dimorphism and the habitat in which they live.
Born as sketches of blocknotes, they are essentially made on paper, charcoal and pencil, and subsequently treated with other techniques.
There is no hierarchy, and these creatures seem to live in a total anarchy, being primordial elements of an original chaos.
The series, which began in early 2000, is still expanding with continuous new species and peculiarities, always maintaining their membership as shadow creatures of the dark side of Chaos.
The Latin term monstrum essentially indicates a divine sign, a prodigy, and derives from the theme of "monere": warning, admonishing.
The monster, in its original meaning, is the appearance, the manifestation, the sudden appearance of extraordinary something, of divine, which violates nature and which is a warning and warning to man.
The omen arouses a sense of wonder and amazement and can be pompous or nefarious, thus generating reassurance or fear.
We need to start from the fright, from the gash that it introduces each time we get closer to knowledge, to understanding, to the deep perception of the monstrosity that accompanies us in this life experience. How to frighten the scare? How do you live with the appearance of awareness? This interrogative accompanies the artistic journey of Roberto Del Frate, an artist who lives of infinite, of absolute and of constant stylistic and intellectual decentralization.
From the landscape to the portrait, his walking crosses the constant of the uneasy discomfort. inscrutable, undecidable, to advance in the scenario where something always escapes the gaze of those who look for the meaning of the sign and not its contradiction.
How then do not get to the event? To the representation and decryption of our hidden and unconscious plots?
From time to time, from paper to paper, sign in sign, like furious hieroglyphics, the HMonsters appear.
Small or large manifestations of hidden emotions, frozen, rarefied, escaped the logic of the human world.
Immersed in a non-place, free to be or not be without depending on judgments or complacency. without being plundered by the desire for pleasure or by the slavery of desire, as signifiers who slip without any rule except that of freedom of expression.
Those who love the Roberto Del Frate's HMons approach what still agitates us despite the thousands of mental conditions that surround us; he enjoys the absence of time, of haste, of entertainment at all costs.
Fluctuating in the flat liquid of their existence, the HMonster reveal themselves in their simplicity and absoluteness, without concessions or winks. They are like that. No problems arise, they are absolved because they are sinless. I am not against anyone, they do not contest anyone, they go towards their path of listening and reflection: not against the other, but towards Other.
Sessuati in a casual way, without having to conform to the semblance.
Intertwined men and women. Fathers and uncles sons who live in their silent suspended time where the echo wanders undisturbed to create enveloping symphonies.
Monsters are around us, in parallel worlds, they incite us to new rhythms, reflections, new choices. Monsters are inside us, in psychic layers, cohabit with social rules, but they distance themselves, free to act as they want, without having to rer-act to external conditions.
Monsters warn, even in their phlegmatic life, that there is something else from us.
It is up to us to welcome the voice, the expression, the doubts, the changes.
They are us, and we are them.
Roberta de Jorio
