Biografia

Carlo Roselli was born in Milan in 1939.  While still adolescent, his family moved to Rome where he attended high school.  He had already started painting.  Following a diploma in classical studies, he entered the Faculty of Law of the Rome University and, later, the faculty of Political Scienses, but without much enthusiasm. He became interested in the theatre and with a group of friends formed a small company, performing Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Ionesco and others.  At the beginning of the sixties, he abandoned his studies, friends and family and left for Paris, attracted by the illusion of a goal to which he aspired profoundly: Art.  He settled in the Latin Quarter and attended regular language courses in French and Spanish.  During his three years in Paris, he made many friends among the artist community and among other personalities of the art and theatre world.  But it was in art that the Parisian environment influenced him most of all:  to this day, the echoes of that period may be seen in his paintings.  While in  Paris, he met Susan Beswick, a London girl, whom he would later marry in England, and who was to become his life companion.  After Paris and a year in London’s Notting Hill, he returned to Rome and travelled extensively, together with Susan, to many parts of the world.  By the end of the sixties, Roselli had finally settled in Rome.

He started to paint more seriously, with intervening periods of study in philosophy. mathematics and physics, but without neglecting his interest in the theatre.  In the end, however, painting predominated over the theatre:  from this decision sprang his figures with their everchanging mimicry, where Roselli pinpoints the essential characteristics of human nature, masterfully blended in a chromatic expressiveness which is instinctively understood, like a thought, unspoken yet perceived.  Up until 1972 he followed courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.  He made the acquaintance of many artists of his generation with the same figurative tendency, instinctively congenial to his character.  Roselli’s first one-man show dates back to 1973 in Rome’s via Margutta at the N.F.1 Gallery.  From then onwards, Roselli became a part of the art scene, extending from the “roman” and “traditional” styles to a more European expressiveness and exhibited all over Italy.  From 1983, starting with an exhibition in France, there followed a series of exhibitions in Rome, Geneva, Lucerne, Paris and London.  Since 1984, the Rome gallery “La Vetrata” and “Meeting Art” in Vercelli deal with his work on a permanent basis.  In addition, his paintings are present in important auction houses, such as Sotheby’s and Christies of London, Finarte of Rome and the Meeting Art in Vercelli.

In the beginning of the nineties, he started to frequent the studio of his friend and painter Ennio Calabria, where, together with other artists, poets, writers and scientists they initiated an ongoing cycle of passionate debates on existential themes. In the same period, in the wake of his scientific studies, Roselli became attracted by the need to investigate new forms of expression and began to create abstract sculptures, using plastic, silver, iron and other materials. During those years, driven by his insatiable curiosity and assisted by Professors of the Universities La Sapienza and Roma Tre (Mario Barra, Bruno Raffaele Stella, Francesco Denotari Stefani, Alfonso Sutera and others), he studied mathematics and physics in depth and, in particular, the counter-intuitive implications of Quantum Mechanics. The first fruits of  his research are described in a book entitled “Geometrodinamica e Architettura del vuoto” (Editor Kappa, Rome 2000). Part of this work, inclusive of a sculpture, has been selected by the american mathematician Ivars Peterson in his book “Fragments of Infinity: A kaleidoscope of math ant art”, published in USA by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in 2001. More recently, an article entitled “The Dead-Alive Physicist Experiment”: a case study disproving the hypothesis that consciousness causes the collapse of the wave-function in quantum mechanical measurement processes”, will be soon submitted for publication to an international journal of theoretical physics. At present Roselli has completed a book (as yet unpublished) entitled “A neo-classical conception of reality: how and why something exists”. The considerations concerning the fundamental issues in physics, logic and mathematics which he attempts to address in this book have enabled him to conceive and illustrate a wide variety of three-dimensional images inclusive of some computer-aided animations. In particular, he describes a few conceptual and theoretical experiments which aim at finding a rational solution to some of the main mysteries related to quantum physics, quantum cosmology and consciousness. All his work is the product of a passionate and wide-ranging research which began when he was very young and which has been, as well as his commitment to art, a constant companion throughout his life.