Carlo Roselli

Carlo Roselli was born in Milan in 1939. While still a teenager he moved with his family to Rome, where he undertook classical studies and began to take an interest in painting. After graduating from high school he enrolled with little enthusiasm first in Law and then in Political Science, and began to become so passionate about theater that with a group of friends he formed a small company with which he staged Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Ionesco and others.

In the early 1960s he abandoned his studies for good and left for Paris to deepen his knowledge of both painting and theater. He forges friendships and working relationships with artists and other figures in the world of art and entertainment. The Parisian environment influences him especially in painting, with a constant reminder of the atmospheres of smoky early 20th-century cafes that become one of the main themes of his artistic imagination. Also in Paris he met Londoner Susan Jane Beswick, whom he married after a few years in England and who became his life partner. After three years in Paris he went to London for a year and, after several trips around the world, he settled permanently in Rome in the late 1960s.

Here he began to paint with greater commitment and alternated his painting with periods of intense philosophical and scientific studies, without neglecting his passion for the theater. 

And it is still the theater that provides him with important elements, known today to connoisseurs of his works: thus his characters are born with their ever-changing mimicry, where Roselli identifies the canons of human attitudes and mixes them, with masterly wisdom, with chromatic expressiveness, which speaks to us beyond the knowable datum, like an intuited thought, a speech not read but perceived. In the early 1970s he attended courses at the Free School of Nude and Decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

Carlo Roselli lives and works in Rome.