le5venice is pleased to present a selection of recent artworks by Davide Battistin, Venetian painter who, through the suggestion Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat (Le bateau ivre), reveals a personal vision of the Laguna.
Used as a literary pretext, the poem helps understanding the painter’s artistic path. After years of reflections on landscape, the artist is ready to move away from it: just like the Poet is “into the ferocious tide-rips […] bathed in the Poem Of the Sea”, Battistin’s painting gradually loses any formal recognition of subjects, dissolving into his own sensibility.
Every canvas is an inner vision, rather than a description of a place.

Each painting is an immersion into an undefined space, subjectively perceived, where there are no sensory coordinates. The low sun and an uncertain horizon disorient even those who know the Venetian Laguna well: every viewer gets lost, to find the way again. Whereas “getting lost” is an emotional experience, finding the way is a mental process: “I once saw what other men thought to see” (Rimbaud).

The detachment / distance from reality finds correspondence in an almost monochrome palette, where patterning thickness and colour texture work like a chromatic passage.
Dark colours evoke twilight, whereas pastel colours diffuse a light that slows down any movements in the Laguna. Battistin’s painting is made of reflections and small, intense, sparks of light.