Constance Ayrton speaks with the artist about half-asleep guards, inherited monotypes, and the tension between a fast-moving career and a slow practice.
I meet Giangiacomo in his Milan studio, on the top floor of the house that once belonged to his grandparents. The house, he tells me, has recently been sold, and much of what once filled it is already gone. Only a few photographs by his maternal grandfather, a photographer, still linger in one corner. The thirty-six-year-old painter leads me upstairs to a small room, where a single canvas stands on an easel.
“I’m almost done with this one,” he says. “It’s a half-asleep guard, a sleepwalker.” This work will be one of the final additions to The Dead, his forthcoming exhibition in Venice, curated by Milovan Farronato and coinciding with the Biennale.
Rossetti, who was raised just outside Milan and now splits his time between Italy and New York, has seen life accelerate in recent times. “Everything has been moving very fast around me, which is great”, he says. “But my work has its own time. It’s much slower.” In the last few years, he has exhibited in Italy, France, the United States, Brazil, and Belgium.
The Venice show will mark a significant shift in scale. Rossetti has been making some of the largest paintings of his career, several of them developed from earlier compositions. One revisits a work from 2018, now expanded into a monumental vision. On the left, it invokes Giacomo Balla’s Scena spirituale: a profile emerges from sweeping strokes of bright colours that rise like drapery. This surreal register gives way to a more solemn right-hand side drawn from another source, Piero della Francesca’s Dream of Constantine. The result is improbable yet remarkably seamless, a hallucination that feels entirely self-contained.
When I ask about his approach to painting, Rossetti hesitates to define it. “I didn’t really study painting. I was taught by a conceptual artist”, he says. Though he attended the liceo artistico, a secondary school for the visual arts, his practice remains largely instinctive. Working mostly from photographs, he treats painting as a problem to be solved, relying on metrics, grids, and other devices to coax the image into place. “I’m always finding tricks, ways to make an image work,” he says, invoking Antonio Mancini, the nineteenth-century Italian painter who used a lattice of strings stretched across a wooden frame to structure his pictures.
Weaving together subjects often drawn from his personal life, Rossetti’s work has a serene, contemplative quality, shot through with hints of fantasy. In one canvas included in the show, a group of friends reclines on a sunlit terrace in Rome. Starting from a photograph he had taken, Rossetti seeded the scene with imagined details: a golden weathercock on a roofline, an “American bird” crossing the sky, a bright-pink gazebo. “There are moments when reality slips into the unreal, and others when the unreal slips into reality, and times when the two don’t need to meet. At its core, it’s about lack and desire,” he explains.
Alongside the exhibition’s larger compositions will be quieter works, including a series of monotypes based on family photographs taken by his grandfather in Venice. Recently rediscovered during his parents’ house move, the images preserve intimate fragments of family life from the years before he was born. Sitting on the floor, Rossetti shows me several of them: his uncle and aunt at play with his grandmother, his mother on a boat. “I usually work with my own photographic material, but I wanted to use these. They’re snapshots, but you can tell they were taken by a photographer; they’re really beautiful”, he says. The monotypes translate these images into deep, absorbing tones of blue, a colour which runs through the exhibition as a recurring thread.
Blue also appears in a large piece of woollen cloth that Rossetti plans to use on the walls, draped over chairs, perhaps even as a coat. The fabric, he explains, is a remnant from an institutional show at The Power Station in Dallas, where it served as a thin partition from which his paintings were hung. “I thought it might be nice to bring this cloth from America to Venice,” he says. The gesture carries a personal resonance, too: “My paternal grandfather was from New York, and my grandmother from Venice. The stories of my childhood are between these two places. I like the idea of moving this cloth between them.”
As the Milanese sun begins to set, I ask Rossetti what lies ahead. On May 4, American Art Catalogues will publish his first major monograph, Selected Paintings, 2016–2026. In the second half of the year, his practice will also take him to Japan. “He’s had an incredible year, with a solo exhibition in Paris and now Venice,” his gallerist Felipe Dmab, co-founder of Mendes Wood DM, tells me later. “Giangiacomo is part of a broader resurgence of figuration, but he has always followed his own path. He builds these universes by clashing, glueing, and mingling reality with art history in an extraordinary way. The depth of his art-historical knowledge is truly remarkable, especially among artists of his generation.”
Before I leave, Rossetti returns to Venice and his vision for the show. “In the end,” he tells me, “the paintings in the show will really be the points of colour where I want memories to be fixed. The monotypes will mediate the space. The rest will blur away.”
