The Paintings of Paolo Battistutta What lies underneath these apparently angry scribbles? Are they just a tantrum? What is the meaning of what we can still just about glimpse peeking out from this blatant redaction? A gesture like Fontana stabbing his canvas? A statement of the futility of art? A challenge to make us…
Paolo Battistutta, and his brother Enrico, a mosaic artist, inherited from their father Severino – himself a highly regarded painter and restorer – an authentic passion for colour and drawing. A family of artists in a context – the province of Pordenone – recalling the Renaissance workshops in Venice, starting with the renowned atelier of…
Text by gallerists Cristian Contini and Fulvio Granocchia The works of Paolo Battistutta unfold as a visceral confrontation with painting—a tense struggle between gesture and figure, between matter and thought. On large-scale canvases, the artist molds distorted, deformed human figures, suspended in a space that seems unable to contain them, as if they were attempting to break free, explode,…
Paolo Battistutta’s painting is a brutal exposure of the human being beyond the visible, beyond aesthetics, into an abyss where flesh and spirit collapse. He is an expressionist—not in the codified sense of art history. His expressionism lacks Munch’s melancholy or Schiele’s agonized spirituality. It is, rather, an animalistic cry, a trauma made image, flesh…
