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Tell us what you do and your beginnings.
I do what I have always searched for in silence: I give shape to the child I lost and who today has a name, a body, and an unchangeable gaze. His name is JonnyBoy.
He is not an alter ego, but a pure abstraction, a principle that survives the interior rubble and ruins of the world. I was not born an artist; I became an artist. With fierce discipline and thousands of hours consumed in the obsession of gesture, of color, of time that stops on the canvas.
My beginnings are those of an accountant, but behind the numbers beats the heart of a seeker. My childhood—fragmented, complex, fragile—was not the prelude to a fall, but the foundation on which I built my self-teaching, day after day.
Without academies, but with a dedication that borders on asceticism. I am an athlete of art, not a cursed artist. My art is born from discipline, from the care of the body and the spirit, from the rigor of a studio that is both laboratory and temple.
What does your work aim to say?
I want to wake up. Not to educate, not to instruct, but to make what is dormant vibrate. I want the viewer to find himself in front of Jonny and recognize himself: not in a face, but in a forgotten emotion, in a transitional object of memory, in a badly stitched wound that becomes light.
My work speaks of eternal youth, not as nostalgia, but as a saving condition. Winnicott, Pascoli, Hillman, Proust: they all speak, ultimately, of the same hidden place. That is where Jonny moves. His three expressions—joy, pain, and amazement—are constant, and his gaze does not change because it does not belong to time, but to essence.
Through projects like Lost Paradise, I try to build immersive experiences that involve the viewer in the soul, that transform an exhibition into a catharsis. It is pop art, yes, but conceptual to the core. Because even Neo Pop, often misunderstood, is a powerful language to say the unspeakable.
Where do you find inspiration for your art?
I walk. I observe. I remember. My walks are acts of listening. I walk to go back, in the mind, in the flesh, in dreams. It is there that regressive meditation begins, that I open the doors of sensory memory. Proust would say that it is the smell of a madeleine, for me it is a dusty stuffed toy, a forgotten Japanese cartoon, a crushed can, a color.
I deeply love manga and anime: they are, for me, the modern epic of inner childhood. In my work, there are Mad Max and Blade Runner, there is the lucid madness of Alice in Wonderland, the lost innocence of Stand By Me, the visions of Moebius, the cruel and beautiful aesthetics of Akira, the inner strength of Conan, the boy from the future.