‘Dreaming is My Religion.’
Italian artist Marco Battaglini takes Fine Art + Pop Culture x Painting to make ARTPOPCLASSIC®—a series of paintings that mix Classical and Renaissance art with brand names and urban graffiti. Battaglini sez “I would like to take the viewers and move them beyond the apparent.”
“It is normal to judge a neoclassical work as something ‘noble’, ‘refined’, ‘elegant’ and ‘beautiful’ and a graffiti on a wall as something ‘negligible’, ‘indecent’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘ugly’…I want to be the means to expand the perception of things. Through confrontation-union of diverse times, places, cultures, languages, ways of seeing reality.”
“The multiplicity of readings, which combines graffiti, symbols linked to Western culture and elements of pop art in a harmonious amalgam, forces us to rethink the values linked to the reality in which we live, shows the impact that the consumer society has on our way of living and thinking. We are not only consumers of products but also of images, icons, and symbolisations that are part of our culture. My work would be an invitation to see reality ‘without blinkers’, from above the forest, not as immersed in the specific context with limited analysis parameters. I want to create a cultural and semantic clash with a series of contrasts that induce the viewer to become aware of various contexts.”
Based in Costa Rica, Battaglini describes himself as the “Master of Fantasy.” The son and grandson of artists, Battaglini studied Art at the Liceo Artistico in Verona and then Accademia di Belle Arti in Venezia. During his studies, he fell under the sway of the Renaissance art, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and eventually Conceptual Art. This magpie approach led Battaglini to develop a unique style of painting which he has practiced over the past twenty years that fused different styles, techniques, and ideas into one specific form, which he calls ARTPOPCLASSIC®. Battaglini’s technical mastery is superb. He considers his job as offering the viewer “an invitation to think that in today’s global village, with the ‘democratization’ of culture, the evolution of knowledge, information immediacy, immersed in the heterogeneity, the Patchwork Culture forces us to confront with a need understanding beyond our geographical boundaries of time.” See more of Marco Battaglini’s work here or follow him here.
‘Let’s Go Crazy.’
‘Fear Sells.’
‘Il tempo fugge.’
‘Forget Rules.’
‘Fuck What People Think.’
‘You are the Chosen One.’
‘Victoria’s secret.’
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Classical paintings inserted into contemporary urban settings
Renaissance paintings recreated with modern celebrities
Greedheads, preying priests and oligarchs: The politically-charged surrealist paintings of Ole Fick
Trendy celebrity diets photographed like stately still lifes from the Renaissance
Ugly Renaissance Babies