Tell us what you do and your beginnings.
I do what I have always searched for in silence: I give shape to the child I lost and who today has a name, a body, and an unchangeable gaze. His name is JonnyBoy.
He is not an alter ego, but a pure abstraction, a principle that survives the interior rubble and ruins of the world. I was not born an artist; I became an artist. With fierce discipline and thousands of hours consumed in the obsession of gesture, of color, of time that stops on the canvas.
My beginnings are those of an accountant, but behind the numbers beats the heart of a seeker. My childhood—fragmented, complex, fragile—was not the prelude to a fall, but the foundation on which I built my self-teaching, day after day.
Without academies, but with a dedication that borders on asceticism. I am an athlete of art, not a cursed artist. My art is born from discipline, from the care of the body and the spirit, from the rigor of a studio that is both laboratory and temple.
What does your work aim to say?
I want to wake up. Not to educate, not to instruct, but to make what is dormant vibrate. I want the viewer to find himself in front of Jonny and recognize himself: not in a face, but in a forgotten emotion, in a transitional object of memory, in a badly stitched wound that becomes light.
My work speaks of eternal youth, not as nostalgia, but as a saving condition. Winnicott, Pascoli, Hillman, Proust: they all speak, ultimately, of the same hidden place. That is where Jonny moves. His three expressions—joy, pain, and amazement—are constant, and his gaze does not change because it does not belong to time, but to essence.
Through projects like Lost Paradise, I try to build immersive experiences that involve the viewer in the soul, that transform an exhibition into a catharsis. It is pop art, yes, but conceptual to the core. Because even Neo Pop, often misunderstood, is a powerful language to say the unspeakable.
Where do you find inspiration for your art?
I walk. I observe. I remember. My walks are acts of listening. I walk to go back, in the mind, in the flesh, in dreams. It is there that regressive meditation begins, that I open the doors of sensory memory. Proust would say that it is the smell of a madeleine, for me it is a dusty stuffed toy, a forgotten Japanese cartoon, a crushed can, a color.
I deeply love manga and anime: they are, for me, the modern epic of inner childhood. In my work, there are Mad Max and Blade Runner, there is the lucid madness of Alice in Wonderland, the lost innocence of Stand By Me, the visions of Moebius, the cruel and beautiful aesthetics of Akira, the inner strength of Conan, the boy from the future.
There is the melancholy of Rocky Joe and the magical irony of Haran Banjo. But there is also something more ancient: the solitude of Pinocchio, the dream of Peter Pan, the wandering of Ulysses.
JonnyBoy is a little hero in an endless odyssey, a fugitive in a broken universe, a survivor who still wants to laugh. Everything speaks to me: objects, memories, uninhabited cities, the solitude of 80s video games, music. And even silence.
Could you give us some insight into your creative process?
My process is a layered journey. It starts from the body, passes through the mind, and lands in color. It begins with walking—physical and mental exercise—continues with regressive meditation, then the use of digital animation software, then hand drawing, and finally painting, often on canvas but also on shaped wooden supports that take on volume and life.
My laboratory is large, super organized, because confusion is not a source of inspiration: it is just noise. Art, for me, is construction, training, and resistance. Each work is born as a small ritual. And each event is conceived as a total work: immersive, theatrical, multisensory.
What are your future projects?
After Lost Paradise, which tells of a world in ruins where only JonnyBoy and his invincible light survive, I am working on a new event dedicated to rebirth and the theme of eternal youth. It will be an altar to nature that reclaims time. My language remains Neo Pop, but expands with new symbols and rituals.
I am also working on a large public sculpture in China, a contemporary totem that tells the universality of Jonny. The collaboration with Maddox Gallery in London sees me engaged in a series of exclusive works that bring JonnyBoy into the heart of international collecting.
At the same time, I continue my research as a digital artist, a pioneer of crypto art, experimenting with hybridizations between physical and virtual. And like any real project, it never ends: it evolves, breaks, recomposes itself, like Jonny himself.
Who is Jonny Boy? What is his origin, and what meaning does he have for you?
JonnyBoy is me, he is you, he is anyone who still has a spark of what he was inside. He is personal because he was born from my story, from my memories, from my dreams. But he is universal because every person has a child hidden somewhere, and JonnyBoy is the key to finding it.
JonnyBoy was born from the need to remember, to find what time and the world try to erase. He is the child who lives inside me, inside you, inside each of us. It is not nostalgia, it is not regression. It is a journey.
A rite of passage in reverse. He is the uncorrupted soul, the echo of what we were before the noise of the world covered us with its dust. JonnyBoy is a flame in a dark room, a voice that shouts into the void: “I’m still here”.
Interview by Fabio Pariante, X • Instagram • Website