Doriam Battaglia, Blu (ONE – From red to blu, from blu to red), 2021

Oil on canvas

This painting presents an abstract composition dominated by an intense range of blues that extends across the surface in varying depths and tonalities. Cobalt blue, brighter azure hues, and areas of deep blue create a vibrant chromatic field, interrupted by white fragments, darker marks, and small orange accents. Color becomes the main structural element of the work, generating a dynamic surface that seems to remain in constant transformation.

The composition appears highly gestural and layered. Drips, splashes, irregular brushstrokes, and denser areas of paint overlap freely, creating a visual rhythm without a rigidly defined structure. Some forms emerge more distinctly from the blue background, while others seem to dissolve into it. The lighter and white marks cut through the surface like sudden openings of light, while the small orange interventions introduce a warm contrast that disrupts and animates the overall chromatic field.

Within the context of From red to blu, from blu to red, blue can be understood as part of a broader exploration of chromatic transformation and of the relationships that emerge in the passage from one color to another. Rather than representing a recognizable subject, color becomes matter, movement, and perception. Variations in intensity and saturation create a sense of depth, making the painted surface appear almost as a space in continuous expansion and contraction.

About the Artist

Doriam Battaglia is an Italian artist and architect born in Berbenno di Valtellina in 1949. He has lived and worked in Como for most of his life. Battaglia studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and the Fondazione Castellini in Como before graduating in Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1975. His artistic training later expanded into lithography, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, and other experimental practices.

Battaglia’s work explores the relationship between matter, life, energy, perception, and consciousness. Rather than treating painting as a representation of recognizable objects, he approaches it as a field in which form can emerge through material, gesture, color, gravity, and chance. His practice developed in dialogue with the experimental artistic environment surrounding Como’s Associazione Giosuè Carducci in the early 1990s, where artists sought to move beyond established conventions of traditional visual language.

A recurring idea in Battaglia’s work is the fundamental unity of apparently separate things. He describes this through the concept of consustanzialità, a condition in which matter, energy, life, and consciousness are understood as different manifestations of the same underlying reality. His paintings therefore often avoid fixed representation in favor of layered surfaces, spontaneous marks, chromatic interactions, and processes in which deliberate action and physical forces coexist.

Color plays an especially important role in his recent practice. In works connected to his Stati di Coscienza research, Battaglia uses relationships between red, yellow, green, and blue, together with different levels of saturation, to explore an idea of reality as a continuous field rather than a collection of isolated forms. His work invites the viewer to experience painting not simply as an image, but as a manifestation of movement, transformation, and an ongoing relationship between observer and observed.

Battaglia has exhibited extensively in Como and across northern Italy, with solo presentations including Chlorophyll, Living Matter, Percezioni, Consustanziazione, Con-Sustanzia, and more recently Stati di Coscienza at The Art Company in Como in 2026. His work has also been exhibited in Vienna, Milan, Lecco, Salò, and other locations.