About me

Elia Bonetti (b. 1983, Parma, Italy) is an Italian painter and illustrator whose work moves between the worlds of fine art and comics. Living and working in the medieval village of Castell’Arquato, Bonetti explores the fragile tension between tradition and the contemporary, merging classical technique with a visceral, modern sensibility.

After graduating from the International School of Comics in Reggio Emilia—where he later became a teacher—Bonetti began his career in the European and international comics industry, illustrating for publishers such as Astorina (Diabolik), Marvel, DC Comics, and Soleil/Glénat. His narrative instinct and mastery of chiaroscuro have shaped a distinctive visual language rooted in realism and emotional intensity.

In recent years, his focus has increasingly turned toward painting, where he reinterprets the still-life and vanitas traditions through a contemporary lens. Flesh, decay, light, and matter become metaphors for impermanence and the human condition. Influenced by baroque aesthetics, philosophy, and psychoanalytic thought, Bonetti’s paintings investigate the threshold between the image and its disappearance — where gesture, error, and the act of painting itself reveal meaning.

His works have been exhibited in galleries and collective shows across Italy, including La Grande Bellezza (Kunsthaus), Oltre la Pelle (Expart Studio Gallery), and Arte Factus (Officina dell’Arte).

Elia Bonetti continues to develop a personal visual research that connects the narrative depth of comics with the material and conceptual rigor of fine art — a dialogue between discipline and instinct, vision and matter.