Nicolò Bottalla – Visions of Palermo

The exhibition offers a sequence of architectural views of the historic center of Palermo framed with a nostalgic but not melancholic narrative. Bottalla is a refined painter and engraver, with a particular sensitivity and technique. His “Visions” give us a different look on the city, characterized by the concern and love that the artist feels towards his homeland. He lives in Budapest now, but Palermo remains the birthland of his identity: here he carried out his studies, and he graduated in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in the 90s. His works are now exhibited in Italy and abroad in private collections and public institutions.In these paintings, aesthetic synthesis between dream and life, the artist represents desolate contexts, purified by any ethno-anthropological interference, except the monuments, which remain – together with souls and angels – witnesses of the author and millions of people. His narration is dense: the incisive and dense grid of hatching (typical of the artist’s graphic gesture), tempered by the evanescent liquefaction of color, the pregnancies of monuments and moving souls, capture the attention of the observer, breaking through the wall of his indifference. His style is very personal, and his language does not fear comparison with the heavy Sicilian pictorial heritage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is inevitable, looking at the works of Bottalla, to think of the works of the great artists from the past, but – despite the similarity or analogy of some subjects- the artist manages to escape the risk of comparison, by not following the “masters” of the past, but creating, instead, his own “Vision”.