The Artist

Painter, sculptor, designer, advertising campaign creator, digital designer, and web creator, Amleto Dalla Costa devoted his entire life to art, visual research, and creative experimentation.

Drawing was always for him a natural, almost instinctive gesture — a gift discovered in early childhood. Raised in a family deeply connected to artistic expression, with a mother who painted and a father gifted with remarkable drawing skills, he developed from an early age an extraordinary ability to reproduce from memory what he observed, transforming the everyday world into visual imagination. Trains, animals, architecture, and human figures all became subjects of observation, memory, and artistic reinterpretation. From a young age, he nurtured a deep curiosity for artistic techniques, experimenting with charcoal, graphite, Pantone colors, acrylic paints, oil painting, silkscreen printing, and sculpture, in an ongoing exploration that would ultimately shape his artistic language.

At just sixteen years old, he was recruited by the ARS Film studio of Nino Pagot, joining a team of over 120 young illustrators dedicated to the production of animated films. He later continued his professional path at Fabbriche Riunite NEON, where the iconic illuminated signs that shaped the urban landscape of the era were designed and produced, developing a particular sensitivity toward the relationship between light, form, and visual communication.

With the opening of his first design and photography studio, ARDACO, he collaborated with Giorgio Armani and built an international career as an artist, designer, and creator of advertising campaigns. Throughout his artistic life, he exhibited in over 250 solo exhibitions and art shows worldwide, and founded a personal museum dedicated to his silkscreen works in Brera, Milan, which became a reference point for his long-standing aesthetic research.

After crossing the threshold of eternity two years ago, the artist leaves behind an intense and deeply personal artistic legacy.

Having devoted his entire life to advertising, design, painting, silkscreen art, and sculpture, Amleto Dalla Costa eventually felt the need to seek the deepest essence of his work, overturning every conventional logic of reality with the complicity of a digital camera.

He began wandering through the streets of his city, Milan, discovering an invisible universe materializing beneath our feet: a newspaper page dissolved in a puddle, a plastic bag flattened by a scooter, a rusted manhole cover, a fragment of fabric soaked in fuel. Materials transformed by time, natural events, and chance — stripped of their original identity and reborn as irrational messages, creative representations in constant transformation.

The artist observed them, discovered them, and preserved them in the memory of his camera, later printing them onto canvas in their original, unrepeatable form, free from any digital manipulation.

This collection, entitled “The Eye of the Mind”, represented the most important and personal project of his life. Distinct from his previous silkscreen works and from the artistic production that had brought him international recognition, this body of work marked a more intimate, symbolic, and introspective turning point. He devoted nearly twenty years to its development, continuing to refine it until the final years of his life, with the profound desire that other eyes might perceive these authentic, mysterious, and “forever unfinished” images.

For Amleto Dalla Costa, “The Eye of the Mind” was an open invitation to imagination — a place where the eye of the mind interprets images through one’s own history, memory, emotions, and personal sensitivity. From the very beginning of the project, he photographed using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 35mm f/1.4 lens, later transitioning to the Sony RX1R and Sony RX100 III — tools he carried with him everywhere, like a notebook, a travel companion, a silent “colleague” of vision.