All of the artwork on this page has been created by Rosaria Battiloro, who is our May Selected Artist

Please visit Rosaria at: life_on_mars@virgilio.it

Rosaria Battiloro was born in Naples, Italy, on May 30, 1984. She started drawing when she was a little girl, and at that time, her passion was to reproduce characters from her favorite cartoon and fairy books. After high school, Rosaria decided to start getting into a  more professional arena with her love for fine arts, so she studied painting and visual arts at the Fine Arts College in Naples, Italy; graduating in 2008 with a thesis on Pop Art and the Neo-Pop movement. While finishing her college studies, Rosaria specialized in illustration at the Italian School of Comics in Naples.

Rosaria’s work has been included in several collective exhibitions in Italy. She is working as a free-lance illustrator, and she is being published by independent editors.

Rosaria’s inspiration comes from almost everything that is involved in modern pop-culture that falls in the vast field of “art” and “visual art” nowadays: it can be music, photography, magazine art, fashion editorials, books, cinema, advertisements. . . almost everything.

But Rosaria also creates the invisible world of feelings, unconscious, fears and obsessions. She likes to take existing images and “re-look” at them through her own eyes, and then she re-creates what she visualizes in her mind, often turning them into something else. Her primary goal is to make something beautiful, but not in a calm and secure way; mostly in a raw and more intense/passionate fashion. More Dionysian.

Rosaria feels the importance of having a personal self-image, and she tries to shun that eternal search for perfection in our modern society and culture that is so alienating, dumbing, scary, but still morbidly fascinating and impossible to escape.