The works of Italian artist Paolo Pedroni capture a whimsical and dark world populated by child-like maidens with an aristocratic flair. Though his art is often compared to a cross between Pop Surrealist, Mannerist and Baroque painting, it wasn’t until very recently that Pedroni discovered the Pop Surrealism genre, and he especially gravitated towards the works of Mark Ryden. More than than anything, Pedroni sees his work as a combination of two worlds- the real world in which we live and the fantasy of his own imagination. At first working in street art and graffiti, he eventually ventured into digital art, and most recently, oil painting. With each piece, Pedroni balances elements that are sweet, strange, and decidedly unnerving. For his current series, now on view at Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome, Pedroni took a note from fairytales with a twist. Titled “Poison Toffee Apples”, his exhibition tells the story of Furry, a young girl with a white hairy face. Along the way of her misadventures, she meets a cast of fuzzy and cute characters like teddy bears and snowmen, to whom she offers the delicious looking toffee poison apples. Pedroni says, “Furry was born as a game, trying to draw something that could be nice and, at the same time, unusual and vaguely scary… even though already from the first sketch I had in mind how I wanted this furry girl to look like, I did not certainly believe she would have grabbed my hand and told me her story; there wasn’t an actual inspiration, it has been as if the works composed on their own, by interlacing one another, one after the other. The more I went on, the more I realized it was Furry who pointed towards the way to be followed.”
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Over the past year, pop surrealist 