Born in Turin, Italy, where he studied Architecture and Industrial Design, Roberto has always had a passion for both photography and painting. He worked as a travel photographer in Europe and Canada where his work was published in several magazines and books. He has been living in Toronto for over 40 years where he completed university art courses and enjoyed a career in commercial photography, including pioneering 360 photography and virtual tours. In Toronto he owned an interior design store and designed several restaurant interiors. He was also a designer for office and residential projects in Hong Kong. He is now dedicating his attention only to art projects, alternating between photography and painting, often merging both mediums. Roberto's photographic art prints are a combination of visual elements resulting in a new digital body of work that has flourished and diversified.
Roberto is currently featured in a permanent exhibit at the Columbus Centre foyer in Toronto, Canada with a large 5' x 19' digital collage and a large 6' x 10' print from film photography.
Statement
I paint with emotion, with strong colors and shapes in my canvasses. I like color in my painting, in photography I prefer black and white. To merge these visual worlds, I weave my artworks with them all.
I consider my photography and my art grammar to be in constant evolution, reaching for unexplored paths to find new forms of visual photographic communication. I see my photography as a form of art, using it as a complex language to compose images as building blocks. I navigate passionately through the public domain archives to find vintage photographs and drawings which I catalogue and restore as part of my new vocabulary. I combine these vintage photographs and drawings with my own photographs and drawings in many of my latest artworks. My focus is on investigating the act of creation of the digital collage technique and comparing it with the biological creation where the different DNA from two existing beings will end up in a new unique life. This new body of work is born to stimulate a visual thesaurus and dialogue on the notion of the commons, public domain, replication, reproduction, open access, and the sharing in the world of art and the function of galleries and museums in the age of the born-digital. I am interested in the dialogue between different visual forms, weaving photography with a number of different visual elements such as sketches, paintings, architectural drawings, and my own digital sculptures. This complex assemblage engages the viewer to look for relations and meanings between all the different components, resulting in personal interpretation and stimulating a discourse on the subjects.
My new projects involve "digital sculptures", which is a new way of enjoying 3D forms in an imaginary 2D setting.
Full Copyrights Roberto Portolese
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