The Flesh of the Soul: Painting as a Scream
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 rebelling against form.
For Battistutta, the face is not merely portrait—it is assaulted by paint. Mouths scream, bodies twist, disintegrate, are stained with both life and death. The human figure becomes a battleground, a theater of torture and desire, where identity shatters. For him, painting is an act of violence—but the kind of violence that seeks truth. His brush doesn’t caress the canvas—it claws at it. The image is born from conflict, not contemplation. His figures seem to tumble out of the skin, dissolving into deformity, as if the soul, in trying to escape, tears the flesh apart.
One feels the collision between inside and outside, between what we are and what we fear to be. The face, center of Western identity, is distorted into snout, mask, crack, a tangle of color—as if only by disfiguring it could we approach its essence. There is no pity here, but there is empathy. Because the horror Battistutta reveals is the same horror we all, at times, feel inside: the fragility of flesh, the tension between eros and thanatos, the desire to be seen and the fear of truly being seen.
Each of his faces watches and judges us—even without eyes. Perhaps especially because they lack them.
The influence of photography, cinema, true crime, religion, and literature (especially Eliot, Proust, Nietzsche) fuses into his work in an organic, raw way, without any citationist intent. His art doesn’t seek approval—it demands courage. It dares us to look at what we avoid. In an age like ours, that anesthetizes pain and sterilizes emotion, he stands out as a painter who forces us to feel—not offering beauty, but authenticity. Not giving answers, but hurling the most uncomfortable questions at us: What remains of us when we strip off the skin of convention? Who are we when the figure collapses?
Battistutta forces us to answer not with words, but with the body—and he does it by using painting like a blade: sharp, deep, unmedicated. An art that wounds in order to heal, that deforms to reveal. In the end, his violence is not an end in itself—it is the desperate rage of someone who still wants to believe that man is something more than his suffering.
He takes anatomy and hands it over to chaos—but it is a chaos full of meaning, like the one from which life is born. His works are sealed rooms, airless, where the subject is nailed down, and yet, from that prison, something overflows: the truth—that unconfessable part of us that screams only when no one is watching.
In his paintings, the gesture is both hammer and caress. The violence is never gratuitous—it is the shape truth takes when it can no longer be silenced. In every brushstroke, in every pour of color, there echoes an ancient pain—not just of modern man, but of eternal man, of the one who is aware of death but hungers for the infinite.
The body is the theater of time: it is born, it decays, contorts, loves, hates, dies. But at the very moment he shows it as fragile and fleeting, Battistutta makes it sacred—a man who bleeds, who bends, who implodes… but who resists, as if within the formless, a spark of the absolute still burns.
There is no peace in his paintings—but there is truth. And that truth does not console, does not redeem—but it illuminates, like a fire.
Pasquale Lettieri
