TRANSITS: Paolo Battistutta
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
An art that tears to heal, that distorts to reveal...
Un’arte che lacera per guarire, che deforma per rivelare...
Transits as passages, metamorphoses, transformations is the title of Paolo Battistutta’s exhibition at Cris Contini Contemporary gallery in Notting Hill , London, running from the 14th October – 15th November 2025. It encapsulates both our present and the essence of his practice, naming the constant shift between figuration - faces, portraits, human presence - and the abstract–informal field - the celebrated tondos and beyond. Timed with Frieze London the exhibition enters the wider conversation animating the city’s contemporary art scene that week.
On large canvases, Battistutta stages a visceral confrontation with painting: matter and thought, gesture and figure push the image beyond its boundaries. Paint becomes psyche—emotion before figure—driven by an informal, impulsive energy. His monumental visages, cut through by vivid chromatic fields, open a journey into interiority: less “beautiful” portraits than raw mirrors of vulnerability, where deformation sharpens insight.
The other pole of his work unfolds in the tondos: dynamic, layered masses radiating a primordial energy—arenas of impulses, events and tensions—where the circular form offers unity alongside maximum compositional freedom. Here the ego recedes, form fractures, and an almost iconoclastic impulse advances; painting becomes a transit of body and soul.
The exhibition—produced by Cris Contini Contemporary, coordinated by Sandra Sanson, and accompanied by a catalogue published by Grafiche Antiga—features critical texts by Lorena Gava, Pasquale Lettieri, Matteo Pellegrin, Cristian Contini, and Fulvio Granocchia.
Title: Paolo Battistutta — TRANSITS
Venue: Cris Contini Contemporary, 1 Lonsdale Road W11 2BY, Notting Hill, London
Dates: 14 October – 15 November 2025
Vernissage: 14 October 2025 at 6:00 – 8:00 PM by invitation only
