Rocco Borella Biography
Rocco Borella (Genoa, 22 February 1920 – Genoa, 23 September 1994) was an Italian painter. Having left the college of the Benedictine Fathers at the end of his studies, in 1938 he enrolled in evening courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, having started working at Ansaldo. The first personal exhibition was in 1946: "...at the Galleria Isola they exhibited...perhaps for the first time, Giannetto Fieschi, Emilio Scanavino and Rocco Borella...painters who constitute the cutting edge of art in Genoa" says the critic Germano Beringheli who adds, on Borella "...starts the decomposition of the plans towards a rational rule, thus opening himself up to the extraordinary and future adventure of his chromemes". In 1958, Borella began teaching at the Liceo Barabino, from the early sixties at the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts and at the Italsider steel school; teaching represented an important chapter for both the man and the painter. Countless exhibitions in Italy and abroad, from the Venice Biennale of 1956 to that of San Paolo in Brazil to the VIth, IXth and city in Villa Croce and Calice Ligure at the Consul's House. It was Gian Paolo Barosso who coined, in 1960, the term "chromemes" as a similarity of phonemes, minimal distinctive units of sound in linguistics, of color in Borella's research: light and space in a painting of analysis of chromatism, abstract but concrete, horizontal or vertical rhythmic bands, with modulations that are sometimes light, halo-like, sometimes intense and homogeneous, to structure the image of your works. The Archive of the Artist's works is based in Genoa and managed by the Rocco Borella Association.
