GENNARO REGINA (ARTIST – NAPLES, 27 APRIL 1965)
Gennaro Regina was born in 1965, descending from a traditional family of art publishers and antiquarian booksellers since 1880.
Gennaro mixes together his two strong passions: painting and photography, creating artworks that now are exhibited in the art gallery Voyage Pittoresque Factory. These artworks fascinate and seduce Italian and foreign collectors, especially the Americans.
2007 was the year that legitimised Gennaro and his artistic career; in this year Gennaro created a piece for an important professional firm and thanks to that he received great feedback and brilliant success.
It was the moment that Gennaro established the real contact with the wider public. Later on he organized a stunning art exhibition at Palazzo delle Arti in Naples: this one was the first of a long series of exhibitions in Milan, Rome at Vatican Museums, Geneve, Luxembourg and United States of America.
The exhibition at Palazzo delle Arti in Naples was named “The scream of Vesuvius” and was published by one of the biggest publishing houses in Italy, Giorgio Mondadori. This extraordinary and spectacular exhibition was an outcry for Naples, a city tired of her negative image. An outcry announced and painted on Gennaro Regina’s canvases where it was possible to find a Munch’s echo in the mix of colors and a reference to Andy Warhol with all the advertising language set in his unforgettable artworks.
Gennaro Regina was particularly influenced by Andy Warhol’s artworks with his pop-art, perfect union of graphic art, advertisement and art techniques. He was fascinated by the melting of the visual and communicative entities of the advertising language poured in the artwork.
Gennaro plays with all the famous and traditional Neapolitan symbols, mixing sacred and profane, like St. Gennaro that see the Vesuvius or the typical Neapolitan horn, huge and propitiatory, that comes from the mouth of Vesuvius.
Vittorio Sgarbi, an important Italian art critic, signed the preface of the catalog “Homo Ludens”, published in April 2016.
The catalog presents a complete exploration of Gennaro Regina’s souls, one of these full of colors and another one quiet and romantic with a stunning moon that illuminates grey landscapes like a state of mind of the moment.
Gennaro Regina