Waterfront

lineadacqua gallery is pleased to present new works by Venetian master Davide Battistin, which will be exhibited for the first time in a solo show in the French capital.

"The door onto the canal connects not one particular waterway, but to all waterways; that is, to the liquid expanse that envelops the entire planet." - Italo Calvino

 

Multiple forms of water coexist in Battistin’s imagery: the presence of water in Davide Battistin’s painting is so constant and pervasive that, to some extent, it constitutes the very physical matter of his art.

While his early research was inspired by the dictates of the great 19th-century masters, Battistin’s artistic language has evolved over time in a highly personal way. Venice and its natural environment find a new representation in these paintings: the tones are surprising, as well as the study of light and its relationship with water.
The lagoon is the first great source of inspiration: the milky expanses, the distinctive landscape elements like salt marshes and briccole, the reflections of light on vast still bodies of water. In the Underwater series, Battistin explores a submerged world inextricably linked to the image of water as a mythological existential threat to Venice. For the artist, the undersea world is a place of peace and reflection, of freedom from the turmoil of the surface world. The sea, beyond the strips of sand that border the lagoon, is a secret, almost unconscious presence, which is beginning to manifest itself more clearly in the latest productions realised in the new atelier at the Lido of Venice.

Water is a necessary component of Venice in his painting, where water is absent, he makes it return with the tide, as though he were unable to represent, or even conceive of, the city without its liquid essence. Architecture itself becomes water, or at least profoundly permeated by it.
Thus, the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica della Salute are transformed into blue castles, surreal yet entirely natural images, because the liquidity that saturates the stones of Venice is, in truth, an ancient emotion, a vivid remembrance.

With the Waterfront exhibition, Battistin represents his Venice not only to celebrate its beauty, but as a symbol of the ambivalent relationship of cities with water, prompting us to reflect more broadly on the Venices around the world and their relationship with the planet’s liquid expanses.

 

Waterfront 
Davide Battistin
16.04 - 23.05.2026

lineadacqua gallery paris
Temporary space
80bis Rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

Opening by invitation only 16.04.2026

Opening hours
Monday - Saturday, 10 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Special openings
Saturday 25 April
Friday 1 May
Friday 8 May
Thursday 14 May

Closed on Sundays