Francesco Battistello

Fascinated by painting and drawing from an early age, Francesco Battistello was already inventing stories he loved to illustrate. During adolescence, he turned to street art, drawn to the relationship between a surface already marked by life and the pictorial intervention that inscribes itself upon it.

At the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, he discovered contemporary art and immediately devoted himself to painting, studying its techniques, history, and anatomy. Eager to broaden his artistic horizon and engage with new practices, he began a Master’s degree in painting at La Cambre, which he completed in 2022, before continuing with a residency at the Moonens Foundation. In 2020, he won the Nocivelli Prize in Italy, and in 2022 he was nominated for the Prix des Amis de La Cambre following the Graduate Show. In recent years, he has collaborated with several Belgian galleries, including Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp, as well as Galerie Dys and 10N in Brussels.

In his canvases, the relationship to material is fundamental. Whether starting from a raw canvas or from a surface prepared with marble powder, Battistello adapts his manner of painting and the subjects he chooses according to the support and the way it reacts to the paint. The result is a fusion in which image and surface mutually influence one another.

This approach, strongly conditioned by the support, sometimes leads his paintings in highly contrasting directions. At times they are light and delicate, executed without errors, born from an idea that could unfold seamlessly. Others, on the contrary, are marked by struggle and transformation: built, destroyed, and rebuilt, they accumulate layers of paint until buried images re-emerge, like an archaeological excavation, overtaking more recent interventions.

For this exhibition, the artist seeks to highlight what connects these two seemingly opposing impulses, yet ones that are inseparable from his practice: on the one hand, a constructive, direct, and spontaneous momentum; on the other, a more tortuous dynamic, capable of destroying in order to recompose. Two antagonistic poles stemming from the same source: his pictorial universe.

Through the installation, Battistello explores this link and the way these two forces can coexist and cooperate to produce a balanced whole.