D: For a few decades now, the category of “anachronism,” which expresses the non-belonging to one’s own time of languages or ideas, has been widespread in art criticism. In your case the term has been used because your style is explicitly reminiscent of so many authors of the past; however, I would like to reverse the question and ask you what is your relationship to contemporaneity: that is, if and how do you position yourself in the context of current contemporary art; but also how does the present (made up of events, news narratives, images and ideas) enter into your works and your tools as a painter.

R: A superficial view of my works may lead one to think that it is anachronism that distinguishes them. It is a term that has now fallen into disuse as far as my work is concerned, since as a living painter, I paint everything that I observe, that I experience and that is filtered through my gaze and my feelings. I do not like to call myself anachronistic or contemporary. I am “atemporal” in my painting, which walks parallel to everything that is now called contemporary art.

D: If not “anachronistic,” your titles and subjects seem to come from an ideal or fantasy elsewhere (winged, haloed figures, saints and martyrs, mythological gods, monsters, etc.). But how does this haunting and paradoxical imagination that multiplies and merges human and bestial anatomies come about? I am reminded of a lineage of Symbolist painting (so many European painters of the second half of the 19th century, from Bouguereau fig. 1 to Luis Ricardo Falero fig. 2) that directly enters modern-day fantasy imagery. What is your relationship with fantasy literature and film, video games, board games, and science fiction?

R: As I said before, everything comes from what I live, but also from what I dream. I see reality as having two planes of existence. Above everything I see a world made of universal motions that become bodies merging with strange machines, becoming nature and sometimes deforming themselves, manifesting their true essence.

Of course, the past intervenes prominently, influencing my vision. For years I have studied the great masters of painting of the past, from Caravaggio to Velazquez, from Gericault to Bouguerau, from Moreau to Redon: I have mastered both the technique and the way of constructing the internal structure of the work, but above all the iconographic interpretation and the symbolism of each element of which a painting is made up. What you see today is the result of this study.

Literature has also contributed and keeps contributing to my formation and creation: I naturally prefer the classics, up to and including Leopardi, D’Annunzio, but also Baudelaire and Rimbaud; cinema and music also play a fundamental role.

D: The most famous image of ecstasy is probably Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture of Saint Theresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome: from the earliest seventeenth-century viewers to Jacques Lacan, (male) viewers without exception recognize a blatantly erotic pleasure, the image of an orgasm. Your painting equally openly resorts to explicit, sometimes almost pornographic sensuality, for both male and female. Have you ever reflected on the manner and direction in which this pervasive eroticism is oriented? Is it your gaze as a painter that desires the bodies you represent, or is a seduction of the viewer taking place?

R: St. Teresa and Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni have always been great points of reference of mine. The mystical ecstasy that I paint serves to tell part of my own torments, including that of the search for salvation through the character depicted. I make no secret, of course, that I enjoy and am gratified to know that then the work will be able to seduce, by its own means, those who observe and those who will be transported inside the painting.

D: It has often been said that Caravaggio, the name that is most often and somewhat generally associated with your painting style, anticipated the narrative possibilities of photography and film. You who paint instead in a civilization of the photographic image, what connections do you feel with that medium? In particular, the physicality of your nudes, dramatic, muscular and erotic, echoes fashion photography rather than academic posing.

R: Caravaggio, like any artist of his time, treasured the means he had at his disposal: of course photography for me is useful but not essential. I remain of the opinion that live painting is always the best way to be able to capture what you want to paint, but sometimes the physical endurance of the models does not allow it, so it is useful to resort to the photographic medium. The important thing for a painter is not to become a slave to it.

D: How would you define the social and cultural background of the people who collect or commission your paintings? Do you think the ecclesiastical commissions you have received also define a possible political or social orientation of yours? What is your relationship with the Catholic religion?

R: My collectors are all great lovers of Beauty and beautiful Painting, and that is very gratifying to me, but it does not define who I am. If it did, it might risk drastically reducing the freedom of my visions, which is fundamental I would say to the success of a work.

D: I have recalled so far some elements that link your painting to the present, also perhaps to explain the kind of popularity you have with a wide audience, popular as it were. For example, judging from some quick Googling, amateur or novice painters often try their hand at copies of your work. Your social image seems to be based on technical virtuosity, on the surprise of an execution that is always polished and very controlled. What is your idea of technique (even academic) and how do you judge its overcoming by so much contemporary art, from conceptual to digital art, etc.?

R: I would not talk about virtuosity, I think that is reductive. I prefer to talk about painterly rigor, which was the fundamental characteristic that every painter had to have towards his own creation and which I try to restore and divulge as much as possible, so also with social media, which in any case I enjoy very much and use in my moments of pause.

D: Trying to go into detail about your studio practice, what is the decisive element that makes you satisfied with a painting? What do you like about traditional painting compared to digital techniques with which those same images can get to an even greater degree of accuracy? Have you ever experimented with digital painting programs?

R: I do not like digital painting or its level of perfection, just as I do not like hyperrealism. In my opinion, painting must retain its anamorphic characteristics, its scents, its density, its transparency, its viscosity, and then recompose itself in the painting and give life to bodies and images. For me, painting is blood and flesh. All this I cannot find on a screen.

D: Even your pictorial rigor actually stimulates an admiration that can be described as “ecstatic” in the observer, as it is sensual and incredible at the same time. In front of this kind of language, just as in front of the dreamlike images you compose, the path of your painting seems to have no other outcome than escape from present reality. In conclusion, do you agree with this sympathetic reading? How do you justify this “escapism,” a function of pure escapism, certainly a contemporary key that makes the theme of ecstasy relevant?

R: With my painting I create other worlds, made of emotions and drives, of loves and sorrows. Whoever looks at one of my paintings sometimes hesitates, others get lost in it. I would not speak of an escape from reality, but from a reality, perhaps one in which one does not reflect oneself. Sometimes the real reality is what we find in a painting.