On Tuesday, 12 December 2023, the artist Felice Battiloro opened the exhibition “Identità s.composte” at Alessandro Borghese’s restaurant | AB.
The renowned chef is a great enthusiast of art in all its forms. Beyond the quality of its menu and the warm welcome from the entire staff, the restaurant is also known for its attention to detail and its aesthetic and artistic originality. Anyone familiar with the artist Felice Battiloro might already sense that behind each of his works “hides” a code, a path, an identity — hence the title of this memorable vernissage in the heart of Milan. Through his large-scale works, the artist chose to address a theme as powerful as it is real: femicide. He sought to express its concept, its death and — even more fundamentally — its rebirth. The painted subjects are stylistically revealed and, at the same time, concealed. It lies precisely in the contradiction between the definition of details and the subtraction of identity — as if he wished to leave the sensitive observer a fusion with the work, as if the viewer themselves had to complete it: “the eyes see what the mind imposes.” In these works, the deepest and most remote part of the unconscious emerges. The psychological game of negation arouses a sense of absence, which prompts us to reflect on the context in search of a permanence in what is identifiable and is then reconstructed by our memory. Through a non-objective, timeless dimension, this mechanism leads to personal memory, which then takes on the appearance of a dream, where, upon waking, not everything is clear and defined. The moment oblivion and memory are recombined, the viewer enters into dialogue with the work and evokes a personal world to which, nonetheless, we could all belong. The painting technique helps to arouse these sensations: slow brushstrokes and rapid palette-knife strokes multiply the visions and bring forth figures with no single identity, full of passion and life — along with the continuous, provocative, scratching and romantic “scream” of the artist’s pictorial essence.
