Antonio Elia is an artist that for some time has been active on two fronts: teaching – he holds a chair at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lecce, and pursuing his vocation as a painter and sculptor. This occupies the better part of his daily schedule, not only in the studio but also following the many projects he has been assigned by public and private clients. Among these, suffice it to mention the “Announcing Angel”, in the entrance hall of the Monsignor Tonino Bello Foundation, in the town of Alessano, almost at the tip of Italy’s heel. All his work is a journey between memory and reality, especially the paintings, which cast together symbols and allegories. His paintings and drawings lie under the gaze of a subdued realism, intent on considering things, people and happenings, all pervaded with a Baroque sensuousness of life and dreams. The solar atmosphere of his paintings is marked by a tone frame evoking the gregale wind and certain Pythagorean parchments, a meaningful legacy of Magna Graecia, still strongly felt in his native region. Well, in them we behold the enchantment, the alchemical conjuration, repeatable and reconstructible, of a magic precipitate that combines feelings with ideas, memory with conscience, which acquire, through the occurrences of everyday life, inner symbolical significance. His representations proceed from Apulia, his homeland, and then reach out to a more universal history and to aggressive present-day news, as in the painting “The Woman from Kabul.” In each of his works there is a spinning of signs, colours, liquid metaphors of space, time and light – Elia reunites past and present in a sort of original metaphor, in a symbolism where antiquity and modernity strive to meet each other. Signs, faces and objects take on a turgid and sensual figurativeness; Elia’s work candidly finds its place in the new tide of international painting that tends to suggest rather than describe. The composition of his works is typically Mediterranean and, in its figurative expressiveness, it develops into extremely personal traits and poetic features. Today, a period of pithy creations, his works are filled with myth and eros, and with Baroque touches chiefly identifiable in the curving shapes describing, pictorially and plastically, a sort of imaginary geography. At heart Elia is essentially a poet of shapes and colours, since all his world lives symbolically in the light that evolves from them and that shimmers translucently through a fine dust that leaves no hold to the swingings of taste. This artist is endowed with a highly individual style in the modern sense of the word, meaning a lofty synthesis of the figurative arts. His code, his stylistic method, is recognizable in every scantily traced sketch or pencil drawing. Antonio Elia gives new life to that neo-classicism of imagery that has been way too long neglected by others who have devoted themselves to research tout court. He teaches ways and manners of working, but he teaches to live the poetry and the passion of the actions and events that he immortalizes on canvas. Elia has founded his painting technique on allegories, as if reliving the Middle Ages of our time, through which he filters the sacred piety of old, where magic and tradition intimate ideals of perfection. Son of a South soaked in philosophy and pantheism, Elia has grafted a constructive power of synthesis into his painting creed, by which narration and contemplation come together to seal the most convincing of representations, with densely interwoven references, elaborations and interactions.(trad.Interpres-Giussano)