Doriam Battaglia, Moto perpetuo, 2021

80 x 120 cm

Oil on Canvas

This painting presents an abstract composition set against a deep, dark background, where vivid red, white, cream, and muted olive-grey forms emerge across the surface with striking intensity. The contrast between the dark ground and the brighter chromatic accents creates a strong visual tension, making each mark appear suspended within a dense and atmospheric field.

The surface is highly gestural and animated by splashes, drips, scattered dots, and irregular linear traces. A sweeping white line moves across the composition, connecting different areas of the canvas and introducing a sense of rhythm and continuity. Around it, clusters of red and pale forms appear almost like floating fragments or organic signs, dispersed across the surface in a way that feels both spontaneous and carefully balanced.

The repeated shapes suggest a loose visual pattern, at times recalling petals, leaves, or small natural elements, though they never resolve into a clearly defined image. This ambiguity gives the painting an open and evocative quality, allowing abstraction and suggestion to coexist. The warmer reds and creams stand out dramatically, while the softer grey and olive tones create variation and depth within the composition.

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.