mixed media on board, 21.7 x 24.6 x 3.5 cm, 2025

Horse 2

mixed media on board, 30.5 x 21.4 x 3.5 cm, 2025

“I am me in my studio” (the studio can also be the bedroom shared with another roommate).

Mark Rothko writes: “I am me in the silence of small canvases. Because in Venice everything is more minute, especially if you paint at home; but to paint a small picture means to situate yourself outside of your own experience, it means to observe it through a lens that shrinks and distances it.”

(A. Salvini (ed.), Mark Rothko. Scritti, Milan, Abscondita, 2015, p. 37)

Perhaps for this reason, and with the completion of his studies, the intention to follow a language with an ironic aesthetic has progressively grown in his research. Reducing to a minimum was to be the prerogative of a necessary painting. Sometimes painting seems like the most useless thing in the world; other times, the only thing truly worth doing. The two works belong to fragments of unwritten stories, deconstructions of visual elements. The depicted roads, buildings, animals, and chromatic contrasts suggest the trajectories of a layered narrative. Evident and simultaneous polarities condense a temporality that is at times ancient with a more contemporary one to form a pictorial surface cohabited by semantically different imageries.

Biography

Born in Feltre (BL) in 1996. Lives and works in Venice. Between 2015 and 2016, he was a mechanical designer of eyewear. In 2021, he earned a Bachelor’s Degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in Painting. In 2025, he earned a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from the IUAV University of Venice.

debastianialex96@gmail.com