Pietro Roccasalva (born 1970 in Modica, lives and works in Milan) is one of the most singular and promising Italian artists in the post-Cattelan generation in Italy. His work is a visionary and erudite mix of conceptual rigour and hallucinatory extravaganza: starting from painting as his main medium of expression and ranging from sculpture to installation, from "tableaux vivants" to drawing and film, Roccasalva's creative world is an unceasing investigation into the meaning of images and how we relate to them.

His iconic obsessions are always set in complex installations in which the different elements act like characters on a stage, performing an erratic script that probes a wide range of historical references, from art history to philosophy, music, and literature.

Roccasalva’s exhibitions are a trail in which the flow of information is framed in different "stages", formally closed and autonomous (settings, installations, sculptures, videos and digital images) but also part of a wider process. Fluency and solidity pursue each other and exchange until they crystallize in the dynamic two-dimensionality of the painting-processor. What remains is a screenplay, or a musical score, not written beforehand but rather determined by the event and by an artificer unaware and unwilling: "the purpose flourishes through the outcome".  

For the Ladonia Biennial the artist has made a new version of his two installations A Jockey Full of Bourbon I and II.