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Transits as passages, metamorphoses, transformations: the title of Paolo Battistutta’s exhibition at Cris Contini Contemporary gallery in Notting Hill, 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 Grafica Antiga—features critical texts by Lorena Gava, Pasquale Lettieri, Cristian Contini, and Fulvio Granocchia.
Paolo Battistutta – Transits
Cris Contini Contemporary, Notting Hill, London
14 October – 15 November 2025
Vernissage: 14 October at 6PM
