Francesco Battistello Italian , b. 1995

Francesco has been fascinated by painting and drawing since he was a child, enjoying inventing stories to illustrate.

As a teenager, he became interested in street art, struck by the relationship that arises from the interaction of a voluntary action on a surface that is already “alive” in itself. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, he encountered contemporary art, immediately devoting himself to painting and studying its techniques, history and anatomy. Driven by a need to discover new ideas and engage with a wider range of artistic trends, he began a master's degree in painting at LaCambre, completing his studies in 2022. He currently lives and works in Brussels. In Francesco's paintings, there is a palpable close connection with the material the artist uses and paints on. Whether starting with an unprepared canvas or a layer of marble dust, Francesco modifies his painting style and the subjects he chooses to represent according to the medium and how it reacts to the paint. This creates a fusion where the story told by the image and the support inevitably influence each other.

Depending on this way of working, which is so dependent on the support, Francesco's paintings can take very different paths. Sometimes they are light and delicate, executed without errors, born from an idea that has been successfully realised without a hitch. At other times, they are painful images, constructed and then destroyed and then reconstructed, where layers of paint follow one another and where they sometimes become confused in order: what was painted previously can re-emerge, as in an archaeological excavation, and become the protagonist, leaving the more recent interventions in the background.

Mythologies, folk tales, folk song lyrics are the material that nourishes the artist’s imagination; his canvases then become an attempt to highlight certain aspects of these tales. In Francesco’s will dwells the hope of being able to approach the world of the collective imagination, cultivated and kept alive through these tales, thanks to the atmosphere and materiality provided by his paintings.