After graduating with a law degree, Enrico devoted himself entirely to painting, dominated above all by the desire to enrich his pictorial technique in order to understand the secrets of his ancestors. Through Van Dyk, he discovered that painting can become a tool to show a world, a culture, an entire century on canvas.
His specialty became portraits, an activity that opened the doors of high society for him. His success was such that in 1991 Federico Zeri defined him as the best portrait painter in Europe. But he felt that on this road he could not go far. In order to make his paintings the voice of a society, the tools at his disposal were no longer suitable.
The suggestions he wanted to give voice to at the dawn of the new millennium were anxieties, cultural disorientation and the sensation of witnessing the end of a civilization present – for example – in the films of Quentin Tarantino and Federico Fellini as well as the novels of Philip Roth. Thanks to the long apprenticeship in ancient painting he can now face the canvas with the necessary confidence, because this time it is a question of representing a distorted perspective, like that of a reflecting sphere, which allows him to insert many things into the picture, a whole story .
Robusti usually recounts the overturning of values caused by the consumer society, a shocking civilization in which, on the one hand, each person claims to determine their own destiny independently, but where, on the other, even the most natural of events – like motherhood – becomes a drama capable of dragging the entire universe into a meaningless vortex.