Davide Controni was born in Rome on November 28, 1985. He spent part of his childhood in Moscow until 1991, when his family returned to Italy. From an early age, he showed a strong interest in art and visual imagination, which led him to pursue artistic studies culminating in an academic education in the visual arts.
During these years, he developed a particular fascination for theatre, which became a central element of his creative sensibility. From the atmosphere of musicals to epic narratives, the language of the stage has deeply influenced his vision and continues to shape his approach to imagery. After a pause from painting, he devoted himself to set design for film and theatre, collaborating with renowned directors and artists such as Abel Ferrara, Luigi Marchione, Attilio Fontana, Daniel Defoe, and Ethan Hawke. These experiences broadened his imagination and strengthened the connection between visual and performing arts.
Returning to painting, Controni now works in his studio at Pastificio Cerere, in Rome’s San Lorenzo district, where he continues to develop a practice that intertwines memory, myth, and contemporaneity, keeping alive the dialogue between painting and performance.
For him, the sea is both a real landscape and a metaphor: a boundless, immense space—often hostile to human life—yet also the image of an inner depth that belongs to us all. The sirens, central figures in his work, inhabit this symbolic sea: ambivalent creatures, both alluring and unsettling, embodying our hidden side—the abyss that frightens us but can also reveal what is most true.
In his paintings, Controni explores the tension between fear and sincerity, turning darkness into a territory of listening and introspection. His sirens attempt to restore the inner space where conventions fade and what endures emerges—emotions, memories, and intimate truths.
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