Roberto Alfano was born in Lodi in 1981. He has developed an interest in art since the mid-nineties. Over the years this interest will become an obsessive passion for drawing and painting. A mix of characters and styles are combined in surreal situations, which can clearly be seen in the first pencil drawings: front-faced, full-figured naked men wearing only 3D glasses, dramatic scenes with an erotic setting, or ambiguous psychological situations. The continuous variations in style, technique, and stroke, make Alfano’s work difficult to be described, as it changes as soon as it reaches a result. The artist's goal is the experimentation itself, with its playful and existential dimension, often engaged with children, adolescents, and physically or mentally challenged people, interpreting art as a universal therapy; a non-authoritarian Art, which involves every moment of one’s existence. His primary sources of inspiration still are children's drawings and the mentally ill patients' drawings; post-impressionist painters such as Henry Matisse and Paul Gaugin; Expressionist painters; low-fi and post-graffiti culture. Ph.credits: Pietro Cocco  

This work is part of the series of paintings on canvas “3 Momenti di una Vita Ordinaria” (3 Moments of an Ordinary Life) made by Italian artist Roberto Alfano.

The series consists of 3 moments spread over a standard timeline. The past (“Donna Che Guarda Al Passato”), the present (“Cane Chiuso Dietro Al Cancello”), and the future (“Ragazza che fuma una sigaretta”). Within this tripartite linearity, however, lie stories that open up new narrative dimensions outside of time.

To whom/what does a woman’s memory look toward the past, how does it relate to the present, and what are the projections for the future? Instead, a hieratic dog is as fixed as the present, motionless, inoperative, suspended, like glory, like infants, while the future, like a slow awakening, rests on an artificial cloud puffed by a young woman lost in a bright abyss.