Biography
Desiderio was born in Milan in 1978. He travels between Italy and Cuba.
He is a versatile artist: a painter, performer, videomaker, and photographer. He studied illustration at the IED in Rome and continued his studies in Paris. He then worked extensively as an illustrator and from 2004 to 2009 was a professor of creative illustration at the International Art School in Terni.
It is difficult, bordering on impossible, to give a coherent name to Desiderio's artistic activity. Painter? Performer? Director? Videomaker? There are no answers, because there are no definitions truly adaptable to the character - except, of course, for that of an artist tout court. Desiderio does not paint a picture, does not shoot a film, does not create standalone works, disconnected from one another: he creates projects, ambiguous and layered situations, complex and multifaceted works, connecting images, texts, facts, suggestions of which only he sees the references and the subtle threads that bind them together like parts of an endless and ever-evolving discourse.
For Desiderio, beauty does not lie in the concrete-visible components of his artworks, nor in the pleasure or psychophysical restlessness that can be drawn from them, but in their giving themselves as the essence of possible worlds, of worlds that do not exist in nature and of which his creation is the substance. The artist Desiderio is a "machine that produces possible worlds" and his narration is the modus operandi to project desires and values into a space that claims to be exchanged for reality or to identify with it. The perceived, the real, the material serve only as a "catalyst" for the imagination, without being able to orient or limit it. If, for the surreal and fairy-tale atmospheres, his work could be ascribed to the current of Pop surrealists, Desiderio does not seek to discover and describe what is beyond, fantastic, different from the "real", but describes the real world itself as endowed with wonderful unpredictable aspects.
In 2008, he won the Italian Factory 2008 award. At the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, he arrived with very different works: paintings, installations, videos. Videos have become increasingly important in his production. His relationship with Cuba has also become particularly close: he participated in the 54th Venice Biennale in the Cuban pavilion, in the 11th and 12th Havana Biennials, and in the 4th Bienal del Fin del Mundo 2015 (Valparaiso, Chile). His short films, including Beauty Hazard, Confabula Spurio, I Love my Queen, Bluesky, and The Win on the Sky, have now made room for feature films: his first one, Ahora si llego!, dedicated, precisely, to the long sidecar journey to Cuba, dates back to 2013.
He was one of the artists chosen to participate in the exhibition "Genius Loci" of the fifth edition of the Pio Alferano Prize (2016) conducted by Vittorio Sgarbi, of which he is the artistic director, at the Castello dell'Abate in Castellabate.
Ten years after his first exhibition at the CAOS Museum in Terni, in May 2017, he presented a second exhibition, also titled Beauty Hazard, in the public spaces of CAOS in Terni with IndisciplinArte.
In December 2017, he held his exhibition entitled Nirvana, curated by Chiara Canali at the Fabbrica del Vapore.
In September 2019, he realized the public project Malebolge, curated by Lorenzo Rubini, inside the former church of San Michele Arcangelo in Amelia, during the Ameria Festival (Amelia Municipal Festival), creating large oil paintings on canvas, inspired by Dante Alighieri's Inferno from the Divine Comedy. These paintings were made by the artist to fit into the compartments and old frames inside the former church.
In 2020, he made the feature film Artaserse with Cristiano Carotti and the Versus project, a cinematographic experiment in which the protagonist is involved in a futuristic encounter/clash with the art world.
