After training at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts under the direction of Oskar Kokoschka and at the French Academy in Rome, he shows his first works influenced by cubism, Giorgio De Chirico to whom he has been compared to his beginnings and, above all, the New Objectivity. From the 1960s, he has developed a more narrative painting by taking up the codes of film noir and comic strips associated with a set of heterogeneous elements mixing classical and popular culture (literature, fictional characters, fotonovela, religious allegories, rebuses, newspapers, television, etc.).
Sergio Ceccotti is the painter of normality, of the "bizarre ordinariness" according to Philippe Soupault. Banality of everyday life forms the basis of his pictorial narratives filled with irony. By a process that traps the viewer into a powerless witness or voyeur, his painting unveils a complex network of correspondences that reflects paradoxes and fears of our times.
Under the comforting veneer of bourgeois interiors or recognizable street scenes (Parisian or Roman), his precise descriptions of familiar environment seem threatened by an enigmatic charge, by an overflow of banality or a misleading feeling of order or, sometimes, by the bursting in of a disturbing character, symbol of a crack in the reality.
He has benefited from several retrospective exhibitions in Rome these last years, such as Il romanzo della pittura 1958-2018 at Palazzo delle Esposizioni and La vita enigmistica at Musei di Villa Torlonia - Casino dei Principe. His work is part of many collections: Galleria Nazionale in Rome, MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea di Arezzo, Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)…