Biography
Dario Molinaro was born in Foggia in 1985 and currently lives and works in Milan.
He graduated in Decoration from the Academy of Fine Arts in Foggia with a thesis in art criticism. Resulting from multiple contaminations and inspirations, Dario Molinaro's visual lexicon is built on a particularly fertile crossroads.
His work is characterized by the use of various techniques – from ink and graphite to mixed media, including tempera, colored pencils, watercolor, and oil. The artist's works are distinguished by a certain "musicality" in the composition, where the alternation of fullness and emptiness, two-dimensional signs and fully-rounded figures, deviated perspectives, and various planes of representation form the uniqueness and strength of the artistic message. This message is shaped through a highly personal syntax that connects signs, metaphorical visions, references to contemporary issues or art history with a symbolic universe evoking ancient and archetypal memories.
Molinaro has always had a clear understanding of what art is, or rather, what art absolutely is not and never can be: a fairy tale, a sugar-coated narrative, a distant world, parallel to ours, in which to take refuge. There is no need to escape. Not even into the past, into the glories of what we have been and that classicism we keep in a display cabinet to avoid it gathering dust. We are no longer just that. We were, grandly so, but now we must free ourselves from it because we are overindulging. The nostalgia we suffer from is not a constructive state of mind that spurs us to start anew from what has gone, but a sentiment of raking over, of brooding on something sterile, dead.
Yet we feel those sensations that shake us and remind us every day that we are alive, now, originating from within, from the blood that pulses strongly in our wrists and temples. For Dario, art speaks of this. Of blood and its flow, of movement, of independence. Like a breath, art pushes our limits to the extreme and forces us to abandon them.
