Biography
Giacomo Roberto was born in Pisa on October 30, 1960.
He self trained before his first personal exhibition in the church of San Paolo all’Orto in Pisa in 1990.He showed large works realised with industrial colours. These work were inspired by action-painting and featured bold strikes and gestural expressiveness.
Then he addressed his artistic research towards the relation between sound and colour , music and painting. In the mid 90’s he realised an actual association with artists, musicians and dancers working in the field of radical improvisation, contemporary dance and experimental theatre.
These experiences originated collection performances, great sound and painting mandalas that will give him several commitments at Art School and invitations to public conferences.
From 2000 to 2005 he studied with the Japanese calligraphy teacher Norio Nagayama. This encounter was significant for his artistic development. Studying calligraphy – that in Japan is called “brush dance” met his need to find a relation between sounds and color painting. This relation would not be simply illustrative, symbolic or linked to automatism, but it is connected with a more subtle aesthetic grammar, more capable of showing the continuous and natural color/sound improvisation expressed through the artistic choices and calligraphy.
That period was extremely fruitful: he collaborated, among others, with the Indian artist Krishna Kumar Kashyp and the Japanese artist Megumi Yamashiro. With the latter he created the video “Beati loro” (Good for them), based on the refurbishing of the historical cinema Lumiére in Pisa.
He also produced video performances dedicated to the restoration of large areas of the historical center and the S. Chiara area in Pisa, next to the leaning tower.
In the same period he set up new theatre plays with a his own company ”I dispari” made up of 20 musicians actors and dancers. They performed in theatres and out-doors public areas.
In the mid-2000’s, a series of lucky coincidences led him to meet an artist, Pritam Singh who boosted his work towards a more precise direction. The British musician of Indian origins teaches Hindustani classical singing and Tablas, the typical Indian percussion.
Little by little, Pritam Singh introduced him to the elaborated world of raag, a complex of melodic structures that may be translated into “what colors the mind”.
These works originating from daily musical practice are simple in their form, featured and extremely poetic lively chromaticity.
Thus Giacomo Roberto shows the deep nature of music, shiny and vivid, where natural shapes, such as flowers and plants, merge with decorations in a sometimes abstract mosaic woven as a natural geometrical carpet.
