Art is Addiction (and We Don't Want the Cure)
Group Exhibition – Rome Art Week 2025
Opening: October 22, 2025, 7:00 PM Free Admission and Aperitivo
Craving Art – Art Gallery Via Casperia 33 – Rome, Trieste area
On Display: October 22 – 29, 2025, 4:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Mon-Sat)
At the Craving Art – Art Gallery, the group exhibition, officially included in the Rome Art Week 2025 program, explores a truth shared by all artists: the essential need to create.
“Art is Addiction (and We Don't Want the Cure)” celebrates that form of uncontrollable obsession that pushes one to paint, sculpt, photograph, and invent worlds.
Every artist in the exhibition translates their creative urgency through a personal language, making visible what usually remains unseen. The creative act is not merely an aesthetic gesture or a way to interpret one's time, but primarily a necessity: the need to express oneself in order to exist.
The exhibition invites the public to share this same urge, because the addiction to art belongs not only to those who produce it, but also to those who observe it, feel it, and always emerge transformed.
Craving Art thus confirms its vision of lived art: an emotional and authentic experience where the viewer becomes part of a single, irresistible creative desire.
The Exhibiting Artists
Antonella Tofi, with the triptych Il giardino segreto (The Secret Garden), constructs a sensory journey where color is the protagonist. Every chromatic variation is like a memory surfacing, suspended between nostalgia and wonder. Her painting reveals how art, like nature and the soul, can generate a sweet dependence.
Ariana Zanella transforms energy into fluid painting guided by the four elements. In Mandala Chakra, energy centers become vibrant chromatic fields. Her creative gesture is an irresistible impulse that demonstrates how art is an addiction we do not want to cure.
Barbara Mileto (Babirûh) lets her creative urge choose the path for her Creature made of paper and recycled materials. Suspended between dream and reality, they tell stories of love, fragility, and rebirth, embodying the irresistible power of the creative act that involves the observer.
The Brazilian artist Diego Busato (Diego B.) channels the urgency to create by working with paper using a personal technique that combines painting, drawing, and sculpture. His intense and mysterious female figures embody the complexity of the human soul, merging fragility and strength into a poetic balance.
With AnimaCreativa: manifestazioni di luna nuova (Creative Soul: New Moon Manifestations), Ele explores art as a meditative and intuitive experience. Her works, born during new moon nights, are guided by inner listening and re-elaborated digitally, in a dialogue between matter and light, intuition and technology.
Biologist and painter, Mariafrancesca Pietropaolo transforms her creative urge into immediate and wild pictorial gestures. In the Melodie Cosmiche (Cosmic Melodies) series, color explodes between light and matter, in a dialogue between the cosmic and inner infinite, where creating becomes an irresistible impulse.
Francesco Mariani (Rupez) is a self-taught artist who voraciously observes daily life to narrate it with his personal visual language. Objects and symbols become autobiographical stories that confirm how art is a necessary addiction.
Gianni Boattini, a photographer, invites the viewer to get lost freely in his shots, refusing reductive explanations. For him, art must be approached with one's gaze, with instinct, and with the courage to go beyond the surface and let oneself be overwhelmed by its mysterious and irresistible force.
Luigi Lenarduzzi paints worlds where nature and humanity merge: a palm with a human face, a seagull with human eyes—symbols of life and sensitivity. His works narrate emotions and contrasts, between peace and pain. Painting, for him, is a vital need: an irresistible addiction that none of us truly wants to be cured of.
The Brazilian artist Mario Schuster investigates the contemporary dependence on the image: that urge to record everything instead of living the experience. In his works, born after a visit to the Louvre, art becomes a mirror of this collective obsession with "being there." But behind this urge lies the addiction that art itself generates.
In the mosaics by Mario Riccardo Balzano, the Dionysian myth becomes a symbol of creative energy that overwhelms and renews. Ancient figures and symbols recount how art, much like the ecstasy of Dionysus, is an irresistible impulse. Art is an addiction that seeks not a cure, but freedom.
Michele Schirinzi has always explored the depths of the human soul through an abstract language that translates thoughts and mental states into visual form. His works narrate the tension between belonging and strangeness, light and darkness, focus and dispersion. Every painting is a visceral necessity: creating is the only way not to be cured of one's own humanity.
For Mirta Cocco, artistic creation is a ritual of continuous metamorphosis. In her works, matter, body, and memory regenerate in an unstoppable flow, where even discarded materials become new life. Art for her is a vital impulse that heals, a luminous addiction that transforms and leads to rebirth.
Hyperrealist painter, Oksana Kolosyuk transforms nature into a total sensory experience. In her monumental fruits, the gaze is lost in the details, in an act of pure contemplation. The artist invites us to reconnect with the Earth as a vital organism: we should all be addicted to the beauty of the world, and no one should ever be cured of it.
In the works of the Chilean artist Roxana Urra, irony and melancholy, fragility and rebellion coexist. Her figures are suspended between dream and unease, between fairy tale and nightmare. In her paintings, art becomes a vital impulse and an act of resistance: the only way to face existence and bring light where there is shadow.
The creative urge of Sonia Laiacona is palpable. Her women with slender bodies and enigmatic faces with large eyes are born as unstoppable impulses of the mind and soul. Drawing and painting is a cathartic act: a creative energy that manages to quell every inner torment.
The works of Stefania Grazioli are dense textures of signs, figures, and geometries that chase each other, shaping reflections on the human soul: voids and solids that define fragility and balance. In every work, art becomes an addiction for the observer.
Stefano La Rocca's works, realized with a palette knife, are textured and gestural strokes that translate the urgency of thought into painting. His canvases become spaces for dialogue between diversity and unity, where art is a shared experience and a reflection on the connection between individuals.
Events
Two events will be held at the Craving Art Gallery during Rome Art Week:
Friday, October 24 at 6:30 PM, the artist Mirta Cocco will be the protagonist of the performance Fluttuando (Floating), a poetic journey between dream and reality that combines theatre, poetry, singing, and sound improvisation. The event will culminate in a collective game inspired by her installation, where the fragments of a broken champagne flute will become elements of rebirth and co-creation, symbolizing the regenerative and contagious power of art.
Saturday, October 25 from 5:00 PM, Stefano La Rocca will guide the audience to paint together on a large collective canvas during the performance INTER●AZIONE – Jam Painting, where every gesture and color becomes dialogue and sharing. An intense and engaging experience that testifies to how art is a passion that creates addiction.
The opening on Wednesday, October 22 at 7:00 PM and the events on Friday, October 24 and Saturday, October 25 at the Craving Art – Art Gallery, Via Casperia 33 (Trieste area, Rome), have free and complimentary admission. An aperitivo will be offered to visitors, who will not only contemplate art but actively become a part of it.
