ARTIST ROCCO CARDINALE
Primitive. Honest. Human.
Rocco Cardinale collages found paper, spray paint and scrawled text into raw portraits of the human condition. Self-taught, Taranto-born, drawn to the street.
One more, because these are great. Rocco Cardinale is an artist I've been following on Instagram for a while now, and his work is the kind I find myself going back to scroll past twice. @roccocardinaleart if you want to see what I mean.
He was born in Taranto in 1981, an industrial town in the south of Italy, and grew up inside skateboard culture, local graffiti writers, comics, and hardcore punk. Alongside all of that came a real interest in contemporary nomadism and the social conditions of modern life, which shows up constantly in the work: scrawled phrases, found text, figures that look assembled rather than drawn.
Cardinale is self-taught. He moved to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, in 2007 and has been based there since, working daily and showing internationally, including at MUST in Italy, Agora Gallery in the US, CAAM in Spain, and Artmoney Gallery in Denmark.
Mixed media on canvas · courtesy the artist
Modern society, mostly. Cardinale says he pulls ideas from something as simple as a walk through whatever city he's visiting. His main reference points are graffiti, skate art, and street culture generally, alongside artists like Haring and Basquiat.
A write-up from Agora Gallery in New York called his paintings "emotive, gritty, and honest portraits of mankind," pointing to a kind of primitivism in the work that speaks to something universal in the human experience. Cardinale still counts it as the best description anyone's landed on.
No comment. (Laughs.)
Mixed media on canvas · courtesy the artist
What's Next
Cardinale is preparing a twenty-five canvas collection for CAP Museum, Centro de Artes Plásticas, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and says he's always open to collaborations with galleries and art co-working spaces or factories. He spends a fair amount of time online, mostly on art and photography sites along with music and design blogs, and uses Instagram and Facebook to keep up with news and make contacts.
"emotive, gritty, and honest portraits of mankind"
Leila Antakly is an independent cultural interviewer, editor, and founder of Antakly Projects, the platform she launched in New York in 2003 as Ninu Nina. For more than two decades, she has interviewed artists, musicians, photographers, designers, and creative thinkers across art, music, fashion, photography, film, and contemporary culture.
Her interviews are driven by curiosity, research, and direct conversation rather than celebrity, trend, or algorithm. Antakly looks for the people, ideas, and creative practices shaping culture, with particular attention to artists who deserve a deeper conversation beyond the usual press cycle.
