Luca Barberini (FOTO) is an Italian artist working in the field of contemporary mosaic. Born in Ravenna—a city that owes much of its fame to early Christian and Byzantine mosaics—he embraces this heritage and transforms it into a personal and original artistic exploration.

After training at the Gino Severini Art Institute, he refined his skills through hands-on experience and, together with Arianna Gallo, founded the studio Koko Mosaico. Thanks to a constant dialogue between tradition and experimentation, Luca pushes the boundaries of mosaic technique toward new visual languages.

His work is nourished by a personal and visionary imagination, in which the ancient material of mosaic is reinvented to narrate the present. A key work in his career is Folla (Crowd), acquired by the Ravenna Art Museum (MAR – Museo d'Arte della Città di Ravenna).

"Luca Barberini is irresistibly drawn to the human condition. His gaze tirelessly lingers on the rich and multifaceted phenomenon in which human behavior takes shape, turning it into the object of a descriptive and narrative obsession with both pop and surrealist overtones.

With the depth and gentle irony of someone who observes with empathy—yet knows how to maintain the right distance to see clearly—his works capture weaknesses, clumsiness, idiosyncrasies, alienation, unease, the most irrational impulses, and the most banal aspects of daily life, without indulging in the empty rhetoric that seeks to reduce our behavior to cinematic stereotypes.

The humanity Luca Barberini brings to the stage is a victim of a generalized nonsense that amplifies the futility of the actions it engages in. The characters in his little theatres are bound by a common thread: they are all—each and every one—unwitting victims of a complex system that oppresses them, against which their only form of resistance is their own schizophrenia."

From a text by Daniele Torcellini