The Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati presents Chi è che ride, (Who’s laughing) a solo exhibition by the Italian artist Pietro Roccasalva. This is the first exhibition dedicated to the artist by a Swiss institution and aims at presenting and reconstructing some key themes in Roccasalva’s oeuvre, with a project that brings together around 50 works from the late 1990s to the present, including new creations, pieces from the artist’s studio never previously exhibited, and others from prestigious public and private collections. Pietro Roccasalva’s work revolves around painting as a specific field of action, even when it involves the use of other media, which are always integrated into the process that precedes and follows the creation of a painterly image. The formal and conceptual research that the artist has been engaged in over the last twenty years covers a broad spectrum, in which painting intersects with other media such as sculpture, photography, video and performance, a mingling of genres that however always begins and ends in painting. With multiple references ranging from everyday life to art history, from cinema, literature and philosophy to digital and media culture, Roccasalva has developed a vast iconographic repertoire made up of characters, objects and architectural structures, and a personal lexicon that combines the most traditional painting genres and techniques with recent digital practices.