Gianluigi Rocca

painter

Gianluigi Rocca was born in 1957 in Larido di Bleggio. Son of a peasant spends a solitary childhood devoting himself to the painting exercise and drawing, with a marked and natural aptitude. He attended the Art Institute of Trento. After school he became a pastor, a laborer, a woodcutter and in 1975 he enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts where he graduated in 1979. During summer, he is a cow keeper in the mountain pastures of the Brenta and Adamello mountains. After his studies he travelled a lot and stays in Rome, Paris, Madrid, Saint Marie de la Mer in Provence. In 1980 he held his first personal exhibition in Trento. Subsequently he alternates periods in solitude to deepen a rigorous research in the field of drawing, to moments where the exhibition activity continues (Milan, Bolzano, Bonn, Venice, Rome, Bologna, Turin). In 1999 he was invited to the XIII Quadrennial of Art in Rome. Gianluigi Rocca was the protagonist of the film "The Guardian of the signs" by Renato Morelli, awarded at the 50th Filmfestival of the mountain of Trento (2002) with a special mention by the jury "for the finesse and intensity with which the author tells the search for a difficult, but possible, balance between the metropolitan rhythms of work and absolute freedom in contact with nature ... ». A different way of experiencing the mountains, profoundly linked to the environment and peasant culture, far from fashions but open to confrontation with metropolitan stimuli. A way, a lifestyle, that characterizes the artistic and existential choices of Gianluigi Rocca: artist, herdsman, poet, ethnographer. Holder of the chair of drawing at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, he works by dividing his life between the Milanese neurotic parenthesis and the silence of the lost fraction of Deggia Banale, at the foot of the Brenta in Trentino, where he lives with his family and his animals. In 2012 he was the author of the manifesto of the 60th Trento Film Festival. In the past, for the Marcello Meroni Prize, he was awarded during the second edition (2009) and the fourth edition (year 2011)