Carmelo Violi was born in 1979, at Reggio Calabria, Italy. He grew up stimulated by art at home, because his parents are sculptors, ceramists, and medalists as well.
Carmelo studied art, specialized in painting, at the Brera Art Academy, in Milan. After teaching for about eight years in a Rudolf Steiner high school, in 2010, he co-founded the art-oriented high school Nuovo Liceo Artistico, where he nowadays teaches painting and plastic discipline.
Carmelo has participated in many contests and exhibitions inside and abroad Italy. Also, he is part of the artistic group "Figurazione Indipendente".
Carmelo's artistic research is attached to the figurative style, and he technically represents his works of art by painting, design and etching. He now lives and works in Milan and travels periodically to New York.

Statement:
My artistic research has always being characterized by a special interest of the marginal reality. I've found my painting's inspiration from the observation of what surrounds me in the daily habits of my time. I face a pictorial research with topics designed as series. In the initial phase of my work, I confront common themes of art history, identified by the Mediterranean vibrations, which reflects my intrinsic character. During that period I thought about art as a manifestation of the mood, and the canvas as a mirror and stirring of visible sensations.
As time passed by, the chromatic expressiveness had been transformed in a rigorous study of colors and light that came from the framing walls in the domestic environment I perceived in the daily life.
Subsequently, the painting is no longer the ultimate aim, but the path to "exhibit" tools and instruments that the technological development has taken out from the daily life, and then, belongs to our collective memory. In some cases, this are rediscovered objects that we see in everything that we can find by accumulating materials in time.
In my latest works, I'm facing the issue of "games recovered". This games comes back to life as part of a virtual reality that is within the history of each user. In other cases, I use the metaphor of the game to talk about the disaster of the war experienced by children. The drama emerges in a delicate manner, without rhetoric, and painting leads me to a profound personal reflection of the problem.
Indeed, in the constancy of my work, I've found the ideas and the answers to what was my research. I've been satisfied by a color mixed on the palette and canvas, or stretched by a sign and vital fluid defined with apparent facility, but in its nature, deeply studied.
(Carmelo Violi, 2009)