Crossings and sinkings
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 Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini who created paintings, furniture and furnishings there. Paolo Battistutta soon distinguished himself through a narrative vision that, even while studying at the Art Institute, came forward as original, rich and striking.
Gifted with remarkable graphic skills, his expressive urgency reached fulfilment in the early 2000s with the creation of large format canvases essentially characterised by two thematic nuclei destined to become, over time, his predominant subjects: portraits, combined with figure studies, and free composition, tending towards the abstract and markedly gestural.
While the portraits initially focus on unidentified faces, on secular “holy families” with emphatic outlines that make eyes and mouths emerge, later and especially in recent paintings we encounter well known effigies, protagonists from the world of politics, religion, entertainment and sport, alongside the artist’s friends and clients.
These faces are almost always oversized, enlarged and crossed by bright, vivid, pregnant colours. Queen Elizabeth is the protagonist of recurring meditations and appears in multiple versions: crowned with light with magnetic eyes and smile or enveloped in thoughts that, like bandages, capture every expression. They are all interpretations of a metaphorical journey into the inner life of the individual, into the multiple emotional landscapes that distinguish all of us, starting from the unforgettable Queen, followed by icons such as Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Keith Richards, as memorable presences of a recent and living history. The profiles and colours of many celebrities penetrate the rhythm of a narrative drawn from the artist’s own life, from an evident interest in music, experienced in person at many concerts when Paolo Battistutta played the drums in a band. Paolo marks time and time becomes form transferred to canvas as impetus and a gesture of sound, in a visual short circuit so dear to Kandinsky, the father of abstractionism. Chromatic slashes combined with rapid, decisive touches, the figurative sign and confident line, amplify the characters of the various figures portrayed and construct attitudes with a strong scenic impact.
In some of his more recent works, the use of acrylic with chalks culminates in the dissolution of facial perimeters into dense spots of diffused chromatic matter, replete with evocations that refer back to the lesson of the unforgettable Bacon, here reworked with distinctly personal imprints and reminiscences. Shadows of figures often remain, almost a sketch of an image first thought and then cancelled, a fleeting icon of something that once was but has since been consumed. Circular lines prevail in these compositions and everything seems to rotate inside a kind of enclosed room, bordered by clear geometries. While large format paintings emphasise the face and the person, here the ego loses its central role: marginal, peripheral aspects come to the fore, form progressively breaks away from the ordained and the rational, and an almost iconoclastic intent comes into play.
De-composed, disjointed, shattered and, occasionally, re-composed figures, from which perhaps only one anatomical part emerges, becoming a vexation, a pure obsession of an investigation destined to go beyond the boundaries of true abstraction and the tangle of convulsive signs.
Another major theme for Paolo Battistutta alongside portraiture, as already mentioned, is the abstract-informal expression accompanied by a flurry of visions, sensations, impulses and emotional states that take on the consistency of black, grey and many other colours.
We are faced by dynamic, magnetic and disturbing masses of solid bodies within physical and imaginary spaces capable of attracting and seducing. The formats are still imposing and this is striking: observers cannot remain indifferent and this is also the case for the very latest works dominated by large tondos, with various pigmented and stratified effects, set in the centre of generally white surfaces.
Some of these discs emanate an absolute, primordial, chthonic energy, conveying a telluric power in its purest state, backed up by rare yet far-reaching gestural impulses. It feels like being inside an arena where all daily impulses, all events, dramas, tensions that are part of life, time and history meet and clash with each other. The circular shape generates a sensation of unity and completeness while allowing the artist more freedom, a broader, more intense and layered exploration of the composition.
We are far apart from Mondrian’s “Pier and Ocean”, from the Dutch artist’s vertical-horizontal neoplastic direction. Paolo Battistutta sees the tondo as a solitary act, a ceaseless navigation within the space of painting which is living matter and substance, where body and soul can transit. And if when gazing at these circular surfaces we seem to glimpse scenarios in continuous mutation and evolution, it is because reality itself is vague, mobile, often unreliable, tragic, founded or built on opposing poles.
It seems to us, ultimately, that the Battistutta’s pictorial dimension closely resembles what the exceptional and indomitable Emilio Vedova stated about the profession and role of painters: “The painter is a person of tension and emergency, the painter sinks into his work, into his field, into his space: the painter comes forward to us from time to time with his work…The painting is a recording of the heart of the world, and testimony, every day, of a man connected with his times”. (from “Emilio Vedova. Dalla Parte del Naufragio”, documentary, produced by Twin Studio in 2019 for the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation).
Lorena Gava
