Alessia Tortolo
The creations of Marina Battistella are the result of a long journey, which had its starting point in figurative art, across constant and targeted research, prone to result in something completely new which warrants her artistic production to be sorted among informal art.
The years dedicated to figurative art and to the copying of great masters of the 19th and 20th century were a determining trial and a significant influence on her career. It was the stage in which she improved her technique, experimenting with hyperrealism, copying reality and important works of art.
Today, faced with her creations, we are given the privilege to evade reality. We can let our imagination fly to a place where the full and empty alternate, creating sort of an aerial view from which it seems to emerge a new world, not clearly defined but still uncontaminated. Looking at the paintings, the thought flies to distant islands and imaginary places which do not belong to our, but to another fantastic world. Islands which are placed in an unknown tranquil sea, dream waters from which emerge paleolithic or neolithic places, remnants of long ago sunken cities.
Plainly the approach to re-interpreted archaeology is an evocative and allegoric way. At the surface emerge some elements which denote a similarity with artefacts recovered by archaeologists. The artist skillfully inserts them in a fantastic geography, crafting a balanced composition of colors and shapes.
The painting of Marina Battistella is the result of a figural composition with distinct delimited areas. The areas are marked in relief and planes. The parts strong lucid in which sometimes appears to be ongoing a delinear metamorphic process of unpredictable outcome.
In the last stage of her creations appears a figure which implies human form. The implication is embryotic. It is only a sketch, sometimes associated as and sometimes recognizable as a human form. Sometimes an angelic presence, inconsistent and vanishing, or a face, or the profile of a bust.
Her free and non-conformist personality chose to break the tradition of rectangular artwork. It is no more confined to pre-designed and measured frames.
She is using a base which permits her to space her work in measures and shapes which are not predetermined. They are placed in sequence, or sometimes singular, always with the intent to allow unlimited movement.
So Marina Battistella starts a personal conquest of space in her creation, approaching the sculpture. It is easy to recognize the base used in the compositions.
On the surface we find a game of structural and chromatic equilibrium dominated by white, red, blue and black. The red, favourite color of the artist, represent her well, indicating an extra-ordinary vital force and an outstanding energy.
The blue attracts the observer who can rest fascinated by the deep of the marine surface, or the intensity of the sky, transmitting harmony and equilibrium. White is a symbol of purity and hope used in juxtaposition to the asphalt and dense black. The introspective aspect of the artist, is well reflected on the surface of the paintings. She is able to transfer to it, the characteristics of order, measure and proportional combination of colors. These are the elements she continuously researches in her life and art.
The technique towards which she strived for the final synthesis, is characteristic of her, the density given to different material, giving the art a strong 3-D effect. Where the figures expressed are made by a balanced combination between the reason of space and matter.
Gabriella Del Frate
Insight into the artistic developement of Marina Battistella, permits me to verify her strong ties to figurative art and subsequently learned the informal art from her masters. In recent years progressing to a personal expression of powerful visual impact.
A free painting is characterized by the near overuse of pigmentation which protrude from the surface in a playful game of shapes increasingly resembling a plastic composition.
In my opinion, one does not need to look for metafors and symbolism in her creative language.
The feelings of the artist are manifested in her pleasure of knowing the material, in transforming and translating her personal sensations in compositions where the monochrome background represent the formality, the equilibrium and the substantial images of polychrome variants, projected towards the external outline, the root of her liberating process of research.
Enzo Valentinuz
Temper, grit and determination. These are the elements which turn Marina Battistella’s creativity into action. Art has become the absolute priority of her existence. She earned her cultural background with significant Masters at the Art Institute of Udine. After a period of figurative and hyperrealistic painting, she detached herself from the tradition to enter a field of research. This is a rewarding activity which stimulates her more every day.
Her resources are antique, prehistoric and fossil finds, which elaborated by the hands of the artisan, is presented to us with surprising modernism.Battistella is sincere. She does not fake.
She does not trick. And she is unique within her field. For her, the canvas is not enough. She wants the third dimension to satisfy her ego.So her expressions become always more intricate. Her
gift is a great care for details and an obsessive and meticulous application of paint across the canvas in structures formed by pure colors like white, red, blue and black.
The colors reveal the temper and genuine feelings of the artist. Blue is the colour of the spirit, of loyalty and profound disposition. White for truth, and finally red for her great love for
art.
Enzo Santese
The works of Marina Battistella depict an imaginary journey where physical elements maintain only few traces of tangible reality.
Moreover they appear as pieces of a reality under construction. For this, the artist charges her paintings with symbolism, alluding to dynamics of existence which are in continuous movement toward an unpredictable outcome. The surface of the paintings appear like the geography of “the other world” suggesting the notion of improbable islands emerged in a faraway future, and due to mysterious telluric phenomena, containing traces of buried civilization. Among these, evidence of writing superimposed as collage, incisions and relief, signs which wind into whirls of matter, only to free themselves in an obscure world of shadows. Everything is embedded in contiguous areas which in some places are tempting the tactile taste of the beholder. Here they dominate with ample tonality, the black which transmits the idea of lava crystallization, the red which illuminate the versatile effects of transparence and profundity and white, which can intercept and transmit the light of the environment.