The work of this artist is characterized
by an interaction between life experiences and the artistic ones.
His artistically action rises up from
thought and observation and, in order to translate the result of this reflexive
condition, he uses an interdisciplinary method through all the expressive resources
of contemporary art: photo, sculpture, actions, which share the space into the installations,
mainly proposed.
The final result is a poetic which
goes over the aesthetic and adds an ethical aim: Art as a transmission of sense
and in which the role of the artist is seen as a collective value.
Practising a nomad conscience
of art, he travels through Europe since 1977. In
1986 opens the mental permanent factory, an imaginary state for listening and opened
to the collaborations with artists from any kind of research areas.
He is currently the artistic director of Rad'Art Project, a
research center dedicated to contemporary art, opened in 2010 in the municipality of Mercato Saraceno
(I) and focused
on artist residencies at the
international level in the fields of visual arts and sound research; the conduction of the photographic
workshop, ConCorso, now in its fifth edition, and, in the last twelve years, in the direction of Una scuola X le mani, the school of papier
mache in Gambettola (I).
His work is today present
in public and private collections from Alcover to Budapest;
from Roma to Berlin; from Cesena, where he lives, to Québec.
The Inner Movement *
The pivot of Anton Roca's poetics and - it may well be said - philosophy, which moves between civil / political consciousness and psychoanalysis, is in the recognition - I would say (and rightly so) bordering on the obsessive - of the difficulty of the modern world in recognizing Diversity, Otherness, the Other.
So much so that then to the subjects of art - which are all possible, material and immaterial - he actually adds his own Self.
Every photograph, drawing, assembly, object, action, installation, painting by Anton Roca provokes by identification, interpenetration or association, first in the artist himself and then in us, the act of that removal of the Other; and then it determines the inner motion necessary for the restoration of that subject / object unity, idea / matter that will be able in the time of life to free us from the interior barrier, even sensually blinding.
Simonetta Lux* Taken from the text of the Out of Sense exhibition catalog. 2RC Gallery, Rome 1999.
Exceed the limit*
Roca first of all investigates the period we are going through, which is increasingly characterized as an era of migration. As well as the acceleration of border crossings and settlement in recent decades, the distinctions between origin and destination, exile and assimilation, familiar and stranger, have become increasingly difficult to sustain. Starting from these considerations, the artist, interacting with the outside world, constantly enters into a relationship with the limit, so much so that by deepening its contents and methodologies he feeds the desire, the will, the need to cross it and to force its ideological and cultural. An issue that Roca coherently addresses, rethinking and overcoming the traditional demarcations of the various disciplines and various expressive languages with the use of photography, video, set-up as tools of the interrelation between form and context.
Giancarlo Papi* Taken from the text of the Vers Orient catalog. MPF Art Edition, Cesena 2001.
This journey towards the expanded dimension of being *
Anton Roca's work shows his prolific character and an insatiable thirst for knowledge and achievement. His artistic career has been nourished, in the last twenty years, by an intensely reflective attitude, perfectly expressed in the initials adopted by the artist as early as 1986: Mental Permanent Factory.
Roca's work constitutes a profound reflection on the identity of the contemporary subject - a problem that has decisively characterized Western thought in the last two decades and that finds a place of great importance in Anton Roca's artistic project.
From this reflection the result is a writing that is both ambitious and paradoxical, intuitive and rigorous, conceptual and testimonial that depends on a great control of the material in expressing both the beauty of human nature and the inadequacy of its volubility.
Lisanne Nadeau* Taken from the text of the Être catalog. Museu Salvador Vilaseca, Reus (CAT) 2003
