Joseph Zicchinella

Joseph Zicchinella, born in 1975 in Somma Lombardo VA, studied at the Liceo Artistico and the Academy of Fine Arts in Catanzaro, his hometown.

A groundbreaking artist, he creates works through interpenetrations of material and color: very particular pictorial procedures and methods of execution on canvas, paper or encapsulated in plexiglass generate a unique expressive medium, which the artist calls “transcollage”.

With his works, Zicchinella is constantly searching for the right balance between technique and spirit. A research supported by in-depth studies and a solid background of technical and cultural knowledge, combined with a conceptual path that goes hand in hand with the work.

Active in Italy and abroad since the second half of the nineties, he has participated in solo and group exhibitions in all major Italian cities, in Germany, Spain, France, Belgium and in 2012 at the Broadway Gallery in New York. Over the years he has attracted the attention of the public and critics, being among the finalists of several national and international contemporary art awards.

In 2018 he exhibited with an anthological exhibition dedicated to him in the historical art gallery Cortina in Milan for twenty years of artistic work; the same year he brought his creations inside the exhibition spaces of Castelvecchio in Verona, one of the symbolic places of the city of Verona.

Since 2015 he has been teaching Graphic Representation Techniques at the State High School for Fashion in Verona, where he currently lives and works.

A word from the author

“The mind selects the elapsed time and transforms it into “residue”, that set of experiences that stratify in our memory that are called emotion”. For the magazine ItaliaImballaggio I specially created the work on the cover entitled “empty residue” using glass (a material widely used for packaging) and plexiglass. I tried, therefore, to reinterpret my vision of “residual emotions”, one of my most interesting pictorial series, approaching it not via the content that has been consumed but via the container that, “inconsumable” by nature, is thus the “empty residue” of something that has been. (J.Z.)

A word from the critic

With his transcollages, Zicchinella explores and conquers original linguistic solutions with the expressive medium of collage. His works propose groundbreaking crossings in the fertile territories of research; in them, he  captures the operative suggestions and the formal and chromatic values of matter and materials, which he modulates in compositions full of emotional references to out lived experience, to the deep dimension of being in a harmony of structural passages.

(Teodolinda Coltellaro)