Swiss artist, born in 1946 in Italy, Domenico Battista grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. In the 70’s, his acquaintances with artists such as Cruz Diez, Jesus Soto and Julio LeParc has inspired him to paint. Today, he lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.
Samuel Gross’s words on Domenico Battista’s art :
Painting comes naturally to Domenico Battista, just as much as having a good time with friends around a table, discussing, exchanging opinions and memories.
Painting seems to be simply what allows life to be something else than just a succession of events. It’s a patient practice, almost secret that enables the artist to link himself to the world, the others and the previous. The honest lightness that motivates Domenico Battista to invent day after day shapes, render this first exhibition after a few years of silence and suspension, precious.
The work is recent but draws into a plastic performance that goes back to the foundation of the optic art. Battista built his taste and knowledge in the formal effusion of the 70’s in South America. The artist, witness in his youth of the birth of the modern Venezuela, has been fascinated by the range of joyful colours of the modern vocabulary used by artists that surrounded him.
The optic art with strong chromatic contrasts transformed the perception of the spaces and their use and his playful and sensitive geometry made the world malleable to the artist. Every painting of Domenico Battista is based on an intuitive structure and a conscious sensitivity of colours. The threads open themselves, decompose, cross, cut out the space of the canvas weaving the sceneries of a strange scenography. They don’t have the rigidity of schemas. They wave watering by effect of saturation, but nothing is mechanical there. The work shows the precision and the savoir-faire without cancelling the gesture of the painter that keeps his mellowness, his elegance by staying slightly retreated.
Domenico Battista seems to leave the painting build itself. The rhythm is one of improvisation. The coloured beats take apart and make the overlapping more complex. The canvas is not a simple surface, but becomes a sort of cover that comes crossing and fixing the light rays.
Selected works
Exhibitions and other shows
Solo
- 2014 · Lignes Interference, Galerie Frank Pages, Geneva
Group
- 2018 · Monochrome, Galerie Andrea Caratsch, St. Moritz
Fair booths
- 2015 · Art15 London, Galerie Frank Pages
- 2014 · Contemporary Istanbul 201, Galerie Frank Pages