Michele grew up in San Nicandro Garganico, a small town in Southern Italy. Isolated in the countryside, he would spend his leisure time drawing and cycling. At 18 years old he left to pursue his dream of becoming an artist while discovering a bigger world.
His experience living in multiple cities and countries, adapting to different environments, enriched his ability to connect with people from all walks of life, and the narrative in his painting is inspired by those people.
Michele holds a Fine Arts degree and an MFA from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2007, Spain) and a degree in Illustration and Printmaking from the University of Dundee (2001, UK). His paintings have been exhibited in art galleries around Europe, United Kingdom, United States and South America, earning him prestigious awards such as the BMW Painting Prize, among others.
Michele is also an art instructor and an author, he wrote “Pandemic Stories”, a book of portraits and narrations, and is currently working on “Immigration Stories from Florida Artists”.
Residing at present in North Miami, USA, Michele continues to draw inspiration from his different surroundings, his family and the people he meets along the way. When he is not painting, you can find him sketching people in the street, riding a bicycle or walking on the beach.
His paintings, far from simply seeking to capture a resemblance with his sitters or the reality as it is, strive to construct a narrative. He gets inspiration from the stories of his sitters, to speak about the uprooting, the zest for life, the solitude and the awareness of the ephemeral. In his recent artworks, he transcends realism, crafting compositions that embody fragments of a reality formed by diverse moments and places.This connection mirrors the way the viewer engages with his artworks.