“Les bonbons cruels”: Agostino Rocco at Candy Snake Gallery

Agostino Rocco brings a new meditation on contemporary painting to the Candy Snake Gallery with Les bonbons cruels, on view from November 26, 2025 to January 3, 2026.

Agostino Rocco, Lemony Cathy, 2025,

The artist—known for his ability to make the tradition of portraiture resonate with today’s most ambiguous and digital visual culture—presents a series of new works accompanied by a critical text by Andrea Contin. The opening is scheduled for Wednesday, November 26 at 6:30 pm in the gallery’s Milan space on Via degli Orombelli.

With this new solo exhibition, Rocco continues a long-standing path that traverses the history of painting in order to reinvent it from within. In his works, the echo of the Flemish masters—from van Eyck to Holbein—is never a mere citation, but a fertile ground for questioning the very nature of the image. As Contin notes, Rocco seems to carry on an ideal conversation with those great painters, pushing painting into a realm where beauty and disturbance meet.

The portraits in Les bonbons cruels embody this tension with striking clarity. These faces do not exist; they are generated from an imaginary that draws on the aesthetics of artificial intelligence without ever surrendering fully to it. They are familiar yet unreadable—“icons without identity”—suspended in a dimension that escapes the boundaries of the real and the unreal. Their polished perfection, heightened by masterfully calibrated light and an invisible brushstroke, produces an emotional short circuit: the viewer feels both attracted and unsettled, as if confronted with a presence that watches us without truly being there.

The strength of Rocco’s work lies precisely in this play of mirrors between seduction and unease. Each painting is the result of a slow, layered process in which drawing, chiaroscuro, and thin oil glazes recreate by hand the cold immediacy of the digital. It is an act of total control—what the artist himself describes as an “existential apnea”: a deep immersion in the gesture of painting, where technique and thought become indistinguishable.

Self-taught and born in 1971, Rocco has built over the years a sophisticated and unmistakable visual language, capable of merging formal rigor with subtle irony. His works have been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Pietrasanta, and Belgium, confirming a coherent and ever-evolving research.

Candy Snake Gallery

Via degli Orombelli 15, Milano

Date

26 novembre – 3 gennaio 2026