Simone Rutigliano

Simone Rutigliano was born in Lecce in 2002. After graduating from the Liceo Artistico “Ciardo-Pellegrino”, he moved to Venice, where he is currently enrolled in the Painting program at the Academy of Fine Arts, studying in Atelier F under the guidance of Carlo Di Raco and Martino Scavezzon.

Despite his young age, Rutigliano has already developed a significant exhibition record. In 2024 he presented the solo exhibition JABAL at A+B Gallery in Brescia and took part in group shows including MOOD at Plain Gallery in Milan and the fifth edition of Artefici del nostro tempo at Forte Marghera, Mestre. In 2023 he was selected for exhibitions such as the Combat Prize at the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori in Livorno, Hôtel-Dieu at A plus A Gallery in Venice, and Extra Ordinario IV at the Antares Pavilion of VEGA, Venice. In 2025 he also participated in the group exhibitions New Art Frontiers at Altro Mondo Creative Space in Manila and Aldilà Sarà at Marignana Arte Gallery in Venice, and was a finalist for We Art Open 8, where he was awarded the MA Project exhibition prize, curated by Quadro Zero.

A+B Solo show:

2024: JABAL

The pictorial work of Simone Rutigliano is grounded in a continuous dialogue between gesture, imagination, and visual memory. His works arise from an intuitive process that reworks photographic images, memories, and inner suggestions through a free and physical gestural language, alternating emotional urgency with control of the material. The image is never immediate or definitive; rather, it gradually surfaces on the canvas as the revelation of an inner process in which color, form, and brushstroke become tools of emergence and transformation.

In the more recent developments of his research, Rutigliano operates along an unstable boundary between body, space, and energy. After a phase characterized by dense and stratified compositions, his painting opens up to a more fluid and instinctive language, in which gesture and color act as primary vital forces. On the painted surface, presences in constant metamorphosis take shape, immersed in a visual rhythm that oscillates between abandonment and regeneration, loss and rebirth.

A central element of his poetics is the reference to archaic rituality, particularly to the collective trance of tarantism and the pizzica, understood as states of bodily vibration and as practices of affliction and healing. Within this horizon, painting takes shape as a ritual act rather than as representation: a womb-like space in which figures emerge and dissolve, suspended between the individual and the collective dimension, between the present and ancestral time. Bodies are never isolated or static; instead, they intertwine in continuous movement, losing their boundaries and merging with the surrounding space.

Rutigliano’s painting thus activates a physical and sensory presence that directly engages the viewer, who is invited to take part in a perceptual and almost performative experience. His research reaffirms painting as a vital language, capable of becoming a site of energy, memory, and transformation, and of renewing its role as a space of experience, ritual, and sharing.