“And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. [...] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”
from the Tolstoy's Diary
Biography
Francesco Zanatta's artistic research explores the emotional relationship between objects, places, and the self. It is an active negotiation with the world, one that uncovers new values and surprising meanings. Over the past few years, He has been collecting various objects—drawings, studies, writings, photographs, and organic scraps—which have gradually contributed to his visual language. This collection forms an archive, a system of visual notes, and a strategy for harnessing the everyday, often shaped by chains of events and unexpected encounters. In Viktor Shklovsky's "Art as a Technique" (1917), he quotes Tolstoy's diary, which speaks of the habitual gestures we perform without thinking, like cleaning a sofa. Zanatta's approach to observation aligns with this idea of defamiliarization, a feeling that is activated through the pictorial process. Painting, for him, is a practice that has, over the years, trained and strengthened the muscle of his gaze. Through its rhythms and rules, painting shapes reality, giving new life to his observations and transforming them into more powerful visions.
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