De Rosa’s imagery is filled with pictorial culture. It has no strong links with the particular universe of folk “imagerie” or with the abstract forms of decoration in rugs and tapestries, or with clothing, goldsmithery, the art of engraving, folk handicrafts… It seems to stay visually distant from the sources to which its pictorial choices refer… De Rosas work sits on different fronts, in a complex and rich figurative tradition but completely within erudite art… The adult dream that translates the childhood dream into an educated and refined version. The working of a transformation that is also loyal to the roots of the inspiration. The scenario constructed links infancy, the figurative culture of several centuries, the popular love for the epos and a commitment to construct narrative scenarios for the present. It is perhaps in this ability to marvel and reproduce fantasy in rich and up-to-the-minute images, linked to a desire for communication true to the narrative origin of memories, that we find the present-day relevance ofDe Rosa’s message, which convinces and amazes me in his scenarios.

Pietro Clemente

As a painter, De Rosa is well-educated, with an inclination for citations and a play of meanings, yet nothing is more alien to him than the artifice of gratuitously searching for effect. He does not try to mask a certain coldness of the soul in a baroque proliferation of images… De Rosa is a “warm” painter who manages to grasp the essential and put it forward in a myriad of disguises, exhausting it in his many voices. His wonderful poetic simplicity and his ability to communicate in fairytale form stem from this stating and restating of the same thing, articulated in keeping with the history of images. He also retains the subtle melancholy of the fairytale… Since his visionary debut long ago, “origin” has always been central and De Rosa tries to break its frontiers open for us. Seduced by the truth of his fantasy images, we cannot but listen as if he were an old-fashioned wizard, creating myths and working magic.

Paolo Levi