AGOSTINO ROCCO – LES BONBONS CRUELS
Inauguration Wednesday 26 November
November 26, 2025 – January 3, 2026
Candy Snake Gallery, via degli Orombelli 15, Milano
Candy Snake Gallery is pleased to present Les bonbons cruels, a solo exhibition by Agostino Rocco, accompanied by a critical text by Andrea Contin.
With Les bonbons cruels, Rocco continues his exploration of portraiture as a form of knowledge and illusion, pushing painting toward a subtle balance between seduction and disquiet. Through an extraordinarily precise technical language and a profoundly contemporary sensibility, the artist constructs images that, while steeped in the tradition of the great masters of the past, speak the visual language of the present.
As Andrea Contin observes, Rocco "once wanted to paint like van Eyck, then like Holbein," and today he continues that ideal dialogue with great Flemish painting, questioning its relevance today. In his portraits, the luminous perfection of the surface and the attention to detail become tools for reflection on the image itself: an exercise in discipline and freedom, an act of total immersion in the pictorial gesture, defined by the artist as an "existential apnea."
The exhibition presents a new series of works in which Renaissance representation engages with the ambiguity between reality and fiction typical of images generated by artificial intelligence. The faces—beautiful and imperfect, realistic yet unreal—appear even more alien, suspended between different eras, places, and moods. No figure is drawn from reality, yet every face seems familiar: icons without identity, suspended between real and imaginary worlds.
Rocco's painting is born from an intense process that is both mental and manual. The artist draws inspiration from digital imagery, reconstructing its forms through layering of drawing, chiaroscuro, and subtle layers of oil paint, restoring the value of poetic artifice and visual knowledge to painting. The smooth surfaces, calibrated light, and invisible brushstrokes create a tactile and hypnotic illusion, where beauty becomes a disturbing experience.
Agostino Rocco (Padua, 1971) lives and works between Padua and Milan. A self-taught artist, he has developed his research through the study of the Tuscan and Flemish masters of the fifteenth century and the French and Dutch schools of the seventeenth century. His works, rooted in the tradition of portraiture, are distinguished by technical refinement and subtle irony, capable of blending classical elegance and subversive spirit. He has exhibited in international galleries and institutions, including Lis15 (Paris), Von Burer Contemporary (Rome), Barbara Paci Art Gallery (Pietrasanta), Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Saint-Cloud (Paris), the Italian Cultural Institute of Amsterdam, the Rotary Club of Moucron (Belgium), and Villa Orlando (Torre del Lago).
