Oscar Baccilieri’s Seven Dwarves Series Gives Childlike Depiction of Today’s Society
Oscar Baccilieri is an artist who experiments with painting, sculpture, and unconventional recycled materials, including raw canvas, cashmere, beeswax, marble, absorbent paper, sandpaper, copper, and more. Inspired by childhood, he addresses issues related to truth, perception, imagination, and memory formation, with a playful and curious approach that leads to an ironic or provocative component.
Observing reality and reconstructing meaning, Oscar plays with traditional and innovative artistic techniques, from collage to etching of copper to painting on used sandpaper stickers applied as a mosaic on canvas, as seen in the “Nano-Nano” series of the seven dwarves of Snow White. In the Nano-Nano series, the artist expresses the most notorious dictatorships in history with the Western liberal system, highlighting their contradictions precisely through the caricature of fairy tale protagonists. Walt Disney’s Seven Dwarfs become both the personification of devious American-style capitalism and the gatekeepers of totalitarian regimes, revealing the double-faced well-polished symbol in each painting. Embellished with a background of Byzantine-derived gilded tiles, each character retains its distinctive features and classic cinematic iconography.
Born as the only child of a family with low economic resources in a small village in Reggio Emilia, Italy, Oscar received no inspiration for artistic spirit. Still, he always wanted to become an artist, which revolves around creativity.
Oscar says, “I describe today’s society with a disenchanted gaze, using the materials and objects I encounter. My subjects are both figurative and abstract, based on technique and matter, and always deal with truth. My work is not a mere defiance of materials, but rather an invitation to reconstruct a peculiar vision of everyday life. In the experimentation process, I am guided by the freshness that children have when they explore things like a game, which is visible in my Seven Dwarves or Nano series. At the foundation is the will to look again with curious and innocent eyes.”
Oscar has exhibited in Rome, Pantelleria, Barga, Lecce, Pescara, Bologna, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Rimini, Venice, Genoa, Cremona, and Bergamo. In 2023, he moved the studio to a large workspace based in Campogalliano (Modena). Oscar attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.