Michele Tocca Italian, b. 1983

Michele Tocca (Subiaco, 1983) is a painter living in Rome. He studied in Italy, Belgium and the UK, where he completed an MA, Painting, at the Royal College of Art, London (2011). His painting starts from observation and direct execution onsite as a rethinking of the distances between process and metaphor, naturalism and its paradoxes, time and history. Working from life, indoors and outdoors, the artist seeks a mutual activation between painting in its making and the phenomena, the circumstances of the physical world. An identification whereby painting becomes rain, stain, wall, mud, dirt in a continuous overlap between sensory immediacy and the spontaneous recurrence of aesthetic stimuli, visual archetypes and critical reflections on unusual aspects of history in the present. In this sense, Tocca is the author of critical texts and reviews on the work of artists ranging from Thomas Jones to the present day.  Scope belongs to a series of heads of brooms, part of the artist’s views of domestic objects used at home or in the studio. Each piece was originally a landscape painting that failed and so the one-to-one rendition of the broom is both an act of swiping away and an actual object in an overlap of the memory of an external distance and a present proximity.