Carlo Roselli was born in Milan in 1939. As a teenager, he moved with his family to Rome, where he studied classical studies and began to develop an interest in painting. After graduating high school, he enrolled, with little enthusiasm, first in Law and then in Political Science. He also developed a passion for theater, so much so that, with a group of friends, he formed a small theater company performing works by Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Ionesco, and others.

In the early 1960s, he left for Paris to deepen his knowledge of both painting and theater. He developed friendships and working relationships with artists and other figures in the world of art and entertainment. The Parisian environment influenced him, especially in his painting, with a constant reference to the atmosphere of the smoky cafés of the early twentieth century, which became a major theme in his artistic imagination. It was also in Paris that he met the Londoner Susan Jane Beswick, whom he married after a few years in England and who became his lifelong companion. After three years in Paris, he went to London for a year and, after several world travels, settled permanently in Rome in the late 1960s.

Here he began to paint more intensively and alternated periods of intense philosophical and scientific study, without neglecting his passion for theater. And it was once again theater that provided him with important elements, now familiar to connoisseurs of his work: this is how his characters, with their constantly changing facial expressions, were born. Roselli identified the canons of human attitudes and blended them, with masterly skill, with chromatic expressiveness, which speaks to us beyond the knowable, like an intuited thought, a discourse not read but perceived. In the early 1970s, he attended courses at the Scuola Libera del Nudo e Decorazione at the Accademia delle Belli Arti in Rome.

In 1973, he held his first solo exhibition in a gallery on Via Margutta and since then has exhibited with growing public and critical acclaim in galleries and public spaces in Europe and America. Carlo Roselli lives and works in Rome.