Emanuele Convento was born in Dolo (Venice) in 1977.
After studying at the art Lyceum “A. Modigliani” in Padua, he received a degree in Art History at Padua University with the grade 110/110. In the same period, he studied chalcography pictorial techniques with Professor Luciano Zarotti at the Academy of Arts in Venice. He works in the fields of graphic art (etchings and monotypes), painting, and sculpture. He was invited to three Venice Biennale Art Exhibitions, collaborating in national and international museum exhibition projects; on invitation by art galleries he was present in well-known Italian art fairs, collaborating fruitfully with various art galleries through personal exhibitions. His works, in particular his monotypes, are very appreciated in Italy and abroad and his works are present in various institutions and in Italian and foreign museum collections. In his monotypes he adds a contemporary touch to the crepuscular atmosphere of 17th century naturalism without making an anachronistic operation but producing a regenerated figure connected to the past by a common thread: past and present, indistinctly merge into a unique contemporary pictorial gesture. Figures animated by dynamic brushes that Convento himself defines as being fresh as the water in a torrent but incarnated “in the memory of history”. Recalling the memory of the past, Convento reinterprets and updates subjects taken from art history by revisiting and reiterating them in order to give them a more original and contemporary feel. Through the antique technique of the monotype by subtracting ink from the printing plate it is possible to obtain fresh pictorial gestures thus enabling the emergence of forms from intense obscurity; figures of realistic caricature and mythological scenes become current regenerating themselves with new energy: myth and history become a contemporary metaphor to represent human vices and virtues.
“My desire is to talk about human weakness, vices and virtues through the bodily figure, mythology and landscape seen as existential metaphor. I love to create a form in order to carry it towards a metaphysical and mysterious dimension that transcends its iconographical value and sensitive data, hence becoming an ‘existential portal’ towards an ‘other’ dimension; I wish my works to be evocative that somehow allow the spectator to imagine new worlds”.