There is a recurring conversation about painting in Italian art – a practice that, daily, confronts how much artists act with questionable returns to the past. At this point, a spontaneous question arises: among today’s frequent use of references, are there painters who are truly able to reflect on what has come before, without simply falling back on repetitive techniques and content? It’s certainly useful to know the past, but it’s equally important to focus on what stimulates doubt, connections, and relationships – elements that allow the work to be conceived as something open, in which infinite variations of language and interpretation alternate. So, while for some, painting is synonymous with certainty and visual clarity, there are painters capable of working through technical boundaries, far from classical traditions, with a strongly reflective approach. In this regard, Andrea Grotto (Schio, 1989) experiences painting as a partially introspective search – a subjective and largely autobiographical approach that embraces the minutiae and randomness of everyday situations, used as starting points for images altered in form.
Andrea Grotto, “Calycanthus”, 2025, 120 x 148 cm, oil and acrylic on canvas, courtesy of the artist
Nevertheless, his painting is not anchored to historical art movements but is deeply rooted in the tradition of experimentalism. The latter is seen as a valuable opportunity to expand the scope of pictorial intervention and lend a more poetic tone, further strengthened by the highly evocative titles chosen for the works. In Grotto’s reflective painting, every element becomes an experiential reason, transforming real-life references into a disorienting fairytale. A common trait in all his works is the ability to create relationships, connections, and affinities between what is depicted and the surrounding environment – producing on canvas a game of transparencies, stratifications, and strange ambivalences, with the lightness of a cloud. This is why it’s important to discover the place where Grotto has been working since 2020, located in Piovene Rocchette, at the foot of the Prealps – a space recognized as demiurgic rather than tautological, a sort of environment that gathers, welcomes and stimulates the infinite multiplicity of reality.
Andrea Grotto, “Frowning at the Sun”, 2024, 100 x 100 cm, acrylic and oil on canvas; “Beyond the Twilight”, 2025, 98 x 79 cm, oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist
His interest in space is clarified by his constant attention to the environment, the lived surface, and the traditions and visions that express a specific tension – just think of the Casabase project, set up at Nashira Gallery in Milan in 2023 – through a technical crossing that includes working methods not strictly tied to painting. In this case, Grotto reflects not so much on the sense of dwelling but on how ordinary environments are subject to transformations that encapsulate a deep sense of transcendence. Thus, for the artist, painting is not a simple narrative and didactic representation but a form of resurrection of the fleeting, transient traces of what has withstood the flow of life. It’s no coincidence that drawing, especially as a tool for revision and verification of reality, plays an equally important role for the artist. The drawings are collected in handy sketchbooks, or alternatively on loose sheets, useful for swiftly capturing the unpredictable spontaneity of whatever seizes the artist’s attention. However, in his drawings, something happens that does not usually occur in his paintings: the subjects – drawn with markers, ink, and gel pens of various sizes – are easily recognizable. In contrast, in his paintings, the figure is heavily worked and difficult to recognize.
Andrea Grotto, “Sea Lightning”, 2025, 150 x 143 cm, aeropittura and oil on canvas; “Blowing Glass (I Close My Eyes)”, 2024, 100 x 120 cm, acrylic and oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist
This extreme compositional synthesis, always freed from technique, often centers around a subject that is off-center from the canvas and treated in different conditions: quick strokes, dry brushstrokes heavy with material, alternating with others finely worked into thin filaments. Yet, the artist – committed as he is to studying and reflecting on reality only as long as it serves as inspiration – deliberately distances himself from mimetic realism. In the following interview, Grotto talks about painting as a harmonious practice, for the deep serenity with which he balances different tensions – such as perceptive impact, various painting techniques, and the real element that, though remaining central, emerges only through a few iconic elements like natural artifacts, animals, domestic interiors, and physical states of matter. The latter is emphasized by the technical freedom that explores expressive possibilities beyond classical tools like acrylics, oil and airbrush. The result is a strong sense of lightness with nocturnal and oblique images rich in reflection – pale compositions that condense emptiness and the absence of tangible dimension, particularly attentive to endless variations of blue, gray and red.
Andrea Grotto, “In ciel e sulla terra”, 2024, 119 x 73 cm, acrylic and oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist
The scenes, fixed in the form of a powdery and light substance – both in shadow phases and in negative contours – are characterized by their transparent physicality, through which one glimpses their transformations. A surprising similarity with photographic practice emerges – a technique capable of fixing contours, phases of change, and transparent actions suddenly and permanently. All this enhances the attention paid to traces of life in inhabited spaces – physical and objectual presences that leave sporadic footprints, whose shadows are a further object of study. For these reasons, Grotto conceives painting as a reflective challenge – a place where real references are folded like phases of a fully mental reasoning, reshaped by the impulse of thought. The following answers should thus be read with the awareness of discovering a meditative painter who opens an inner dialectic of today’s painting: observing marginal things to make them protagonists in fluid scenes that barely veil the complex reflection that generated them.
Andrea Grotto, “Lucia”, 2025, 29.5 x 20.5 cm, ink on paper, ph. credit Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the artist
Maria Vittoria Pinotti: Can you describe your studio space, how you organized it, and how you live it?
Andrea Grotto: My studio is on the ground floor of the house where I live with my wife and daughter. It unfolds across three spacious rooms, which I organized gradually, following the rhythms and dynamics of work. The main space (though not the largest) is where I paint – the only room with a door, which I find important because research, at least for me, requires a good dose of solitude and tension and has very variable timelines. In the adjoining room, there’s a library, a stove for the winter, and a small table for drawing. Here I can display works and observe them in a neutral space, without all the things that have accumulated on the studio walls over the years, which inevitably engage in a dialogue with the work. In the last room, I’ve created a small storage space where I’d like to set up a little printmaking workshop, for myself and maybe others – we’ll see…Choosing to work at home came from the need to shorten time and distance, so I could reach the studio at any moment. My previous studio – which I had named Studio Distilleria – was in a beautiful location: a former alcohol factory on Giudecca Island in Venice. It was very different: first of all, it was a shared space, and I remember it fondly. However, it required a rather demanding logistics. The current setup allows me to work flexibly and at any time, which is essential at this stage of my life.
Andrea Grotto, “Untitled”, 2025, 29.5 x 20.5 cm, ink on paper, ph. credit Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the artist
In your practice, you work a lot with physical and visual traces. What is your relationship with what remains in spaces, and how is this translated onto the canvas?
The residual elements of a place – whether scraps, fragments, or furniture traces become elements capable of triggering a new imagined environment/landscape that overwrites the original one. So, I’d say they’re the initial spark. There are lots of little objects I’m attached to some I looked at for no reason, just found interesting for some reason and they came in and out of my drawings, or became something else entirely. Over time, images became an archive of suggestions, sometimes purely aesthetic, other times narrative which I use to create a new environment that finds its place in painting.
Andrea Grotto, “Sketchbooks”, photo credit Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the artist
In your works, you abandon pure representation and narration, engaging in a deeply reflective confrontation with what you depict. How meditative and sensitive to change is your research?
The meditative part of my work manifests in two distinct moments. The first comes right after the initial spark and accompanies the entire execution process. At this point, I like to “experience” the image forming imagining relationships between inserted elements and listening, in a way, to their story. The second meditative moment concerns the choice of the title the work’s name to which I pay great attention: it’s a delicate step that completes and guides the meaning of the piece.
Andrea Grotto’s studio, Piovene Rocchette, Vicenza, August 2025, photo credit Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the artist
Where do your painting subjects come from, and how do you construct compositions? What inspires you?
It’s hard to say where they come from – there are many “parents”. Often, they’re photos, web images, slides, ceramic fragments, someone else’s work, literature, poetry, wordplay…I take something that suggests something else, place it somewhere, break it apart and rebuild it and observe the outcome. Painting gives me the chance to create (fictional) places that I mentally enter and inhabit for a while. I find it interesting to build narratives or visual games using elements from very different contexts. I suppose that’s why I paint, I seek situations in balance between the real and the plausible.
Andrea Grotto’s studio, Piovene Rocchette, Vicenza, August 2025, photo credit Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the artist
What is your relationship with drawing? Do you keep work notebooks? Can you talk about how you use them?
Drawing is a fixed point in my artistic research – around it, various experiments have revolved over time, from embroidery to ceramics. Drawing, by definition, is a way to better understand what surrounds us – to enter a deeper dimension of reality. For me, it’s also a means to clarify intuitions that would otherwise remain undefined. I draw very differently depending on context. When planning a new painting, the gesture changes, as does the speed. In those moments, the drawing is more like a note or a diagram: quick, disorganized, sometimes almost indecipherable. There’s the notebook dedicated to projects, which often makes sense only to me, and not always: after a while, sometimes I can no longer decipher what I had imagined. The notebooks for written notes are another matter: even the paper is different. There I write quickly, often on both sides, following the confusion of the thoughts I’m jotting down, the attempt to put them in order. On the other hand, almost every day I flip through the pages of the sketchbook. It’s a practice that creeps in even in moments not intended for artistic activity, like an exercise in silent investigation. It’s a way to maintain concentration on a different, deeper level. Over the years I’ve filled many notebooks, of different sizes and papers. The only constant is the technique: ink, almost always black..
Info:
Maria Vittoria Pinotti (1986, San Benedetto del Tronto) is an art historian, author, and independent critic. She currently is the coordinator of Claudio Abate’s photographic archive and Manager at Elena Bellantoni’s Studio. From 2016 to 2023 she was the Gallery Manager in a gallery in the historic center of Rome. She has worked with ministerial offices such as the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Culture and the Central State Archive. Currently, she collaborates with cultural sector magazines, focusing on in-depth thematic studies dedicated to modern and contemporary art.
NO COMMENT