Antonio Conte was born in 1981 in Naples, where he lives and works. In 2009 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples and started painting.

He shows a keen interest in mass communication and the “civilization of the image” which takes shape in the projects Facce da Facebook (2009 – 2014), The Truman Show – The secret life of two Neapolitan fishes (2012 – 2013) and in Artists in Quarantine (2014, special section of the Biennale of Contemporary Arts of Salerno).

His reflections focus on the relationship between power and global politics (Wargames, 2016) and consumerism, as opposed to solidarity and sharing. This is the origin of some projects that aim at inclusion (2017, They live among us, for BocsArt) that are multidisciplinary (Contaminarsi, 2017) and were realized in collaboration with poets, musicians and performers.

The year 2020 marks the transition from these social issues to a more intimate research, which had already begun in the previous year but was stimulated by the long isolation due to the pandemic.

The Mostra Bastarda project (2021) started when he was hired for some stage paintings for the successful TV series I Bastardi di Pizzofalcone. He took this chance as an opportunity to drift his research path from the world and its social and communicative dynamics, towards a hidden and deep interiority. An interiority built through his artistic studies that he had strongly desired, the constant practice of drawing and painting, the experimentation of traditional techniques and materials and finally finding himself in a mirror with his passions, fears and weaknesses.

Antonio Conte’s pictorial language shows tangencies with the intense chromatism of the Pop Art fathers and the Dada spirit, to which he often pays homage by creating puns and seeking contamination with other artistic disciplines.

Furthermore, his histrionic streak pushes him to involve spectators through active participation, games and humor.

Over the years he has experimented with sculpture and installations, which accentuate the relational trait in his conception of art. His preferred medium, though, is still painting, which has allowed him to recover the cornerstones of his education and to develop his own and distinctive stylistic code.

The cut of his paintings often recalls the frames of films or comic strips, his subjects are represented in a temporal and spatial suspension, at the peak or immediately after the completion of an action, on colored backgrounds that act as a scenic backdrop.

The sign appears quick and easy, even when the technique requires a long process.

The creation of his works is a process that absorbs all the cultural solicitations that invest him. The titles of his works often recall song texts, book titles and the models for the subjects of his paintings often come from his private life.

His artistic research led him to alternate the use of traditional materials, such as canvas and table, with other less usual ones, such as newspapers, wrapping paper, playbills and posters recovered from the street.

The use of advertising material is linked to its exquisitely expressive nature and its aesthetic and communicative charge, on which the pictorial intervention only partially overlaps. Furthermore, in the choice of the single poster and in the difficulty of its recovery, a Dadaist component comes into play as it is linked to chance and the immanence of the work, as well as to the hic et nunc  (here and now) of its realization.