Armando Arpaja

Armando Arpaja is an artist of Roman origin, but it is easier to describe him as a citizen of the world. His decades-long career has allowed him to travel widely, engage with different cultures and painters of international standing who have continued to influence the ongoing evolution of his art, yet the underlying foundation remains deeply tied to the city where he was born. His first approach to art came at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he and other painter friends continued, day and night, to put their ideas into drawing. Even after class ended, they decided to carry on with their work and frequented Canova's studio, known as Canovaccio, a place where they also had the chance to meet established artists. Through the circle of painters he met there, and in the context of an exhibition, he came to know a figure who would be of fundamental importance to him: Jannis Tsaroukis. This Greek painter invited him to spend a period of study and training in Greece, where he lived for a time both near Athens and on Santorini. From there, he began to exhibit, also at the invitation of the Italian Embassy, and years of exhibitions and shows around the world followed. He has exhibited in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal and other European countries, as well as in various locations in Africa, North and South America and Asia, thus travelling the world together with his team. As a result of these experiences, he settled for a period in Egypt, and during this phase of his research he focused more on the portrait, reinterpreted in an ancient key and inspired by the Fayyum portraits.

From his first exhibition, in which his paintings depicted hidden glimpses, meticulously analysing the light falling on the small balconies and windows of the alleys of the Eternal City, to the most recent one, which will again be held in a Roman gallery, the thread running through all his painting is a love for urban landscapes, viewed with a tender eye for light and architecture, and an analysis of the human figure, both from an anatomical standpoint and through the traces that emotions leave on the face. He is able to express all of this with sensitivity, adapting it according to the cultures he comes into contact with. In addition, in more recent years he has moved away from classical figuration and drawn closer to Surrealist painting, practising Realist and Surrealist art in parallel.