Doriam Battaglia, Figure archetipiche, forme formanti il reale, 2024

70 x 100 cm

Oil On Canvas

This painting presents an abstract composition structured around the vibrant contrast between a warm orange ground and a network of purple, lilac, and brown marks dispersed across the surface. The intense background color gives the work an immediate visual energy, while the cooler purple tones layered above it create a lively tension between warmth and depth. The result is a chromatic field that feels both radiant and unstable.

The surface appears highly gestural and animated by splashes, drips, scattered dots, and irregular organic forms. Pale lilac fragments, darker violet passages, and earthy brown accents are distributed across the canvas without a rigid central focus, producing a sense of movement that extends in multiple directions. Some forms seem to float lightly on the surface, while others appear heavier and more condensed, giving the composition a strong tactile quality.

Thin linear traces and splattered marks connect different areas of the painting, creating a web-like rhythm that holds the image together. At times, the scattered forms suggest petals, leaves, or small natural elements, yet they remain deliberately ambiguous and never resolve into a fixed subject. This tension between suggestion and abstraction gives the work a spontaneous, open-ended character.

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.