Roccasalva's virtuoso paintings and pastel drawings titled 'Il Traviatore' depict the figure of a restaurant waiter holding a silver serving dish with one hand, lifting its hemispherical cover with the other to reveal a silver lemon juicer. The two domed objects nestle together like matryoshka dolls or Chinese boxes, and their shiny surfaces reflect, in turn, a church cupola that ostensibly overarches the scene, thereby clinching the mise en abyme. In two works where the waiter also lifts the striated top from the juicer, we may perhaps imagine another smaller waiter inside it doing the same, and so on. This sort of Escher-esque conceit is quickly grasped, but one is still left to grapple with the striking idiosyncrasy of the forms that compose it. The waiter, the lemon juicer, the cupola—these may simply be understood as instances of subject, object, and context caught in a moment of dedifferentiation and commingling, but they are also so much more specific than that. As it happens, the conflation of church architecture and kitchen implements has occurred several times before in Roccasalva’s oeuvre (notably in Giocondità, a digital animation from 2002), and the Traviatore, or troubadour, their sacred/secular go-between, also boasts a long line of descent in the artist’s work.
- Artforum, 2012