Daniele Marotta

My work lives at the intersection of the fantastic and the human — a practice built across twenty years of comics, editorial illustration, painting, and narrative design, always circling back to the same obsession: what happens when the real world tears open and something else steps through.
The range is deliberate. A children's book page where the Darkness of Siena grins with white teeth inside a gothic arch (Maria e il buio). A sprawling ink panorama of the Palio seen from an impossible spiral orbit above the city, collapsing time and space into a single obsessive line. A musketeer's hat abandoned on a Chesterfield sofa in an empty theater — the hero gone, the story still breathing. These images don't share a technique so much as a temperature.
Traditional media grounds the work: acrylics and tempera for commissioned TTRPG portraits, ink and wash for comics pages, gouache thumbnail studies on black pages for Victorian-era RPG settings. The digital layer — coloring, compositing, lighting — serves the hand rather than replacing it. The mark always shows.
Narrative runs through everything. Whether it's a Poe adaptation where the text becomes the environment, a Little Red Riding Hood where the wolf is already behind her and she doesn't know, or a post-apocalyptic urban ruin speaking in Yeats — the image is always mid-sentence. Something happened just before the frame. Something is about to happen after.
The fantastic explored here draws from folklore, Victorian gothic, fairy tale, Renaissance allegory, and contemporary genre: werewolves operating old field cameras in 1887 London, chimeric creatures assembled from myth and biology, Pinocchio running through ink-black fields at 2 AM, a figure in red confronting a gray crowd in a moment of impossible, silent accusation.
The through-line is the body under pressure — characters caught between worlds, between forms, between what they are and what the story needs them to become.
Current focus: Il Crepuscolo degli Dei — a Victorian horror TTRPG set in 1887 London and 1870 Venice, for which the illustration work builds a visual language sitting somewhere between Klimt, Pratt, and a wet November night on the Grand Canal.