Arte Fiera 2026

For Arte Fiera, ArtNoble Gallery presents Giulia Mangoni’s Intreccio/Tratteggio (Weaving/Hatching), a body of work developed through an ongoing practice of proximity and exchange with artisans from southern Lazio.

“This research takes shape through Cinevetrina, a project adjacent to my studio in Isola del Liri, in which a display window inside the family’s historic cinema becomes a space for the recontextualization of artisanal production. Situated between exhibition space and vernacular architecture, Cinevetrina operates as a platform for visibility, dialogue, and translation among different systems of cultural production.

Within this context, I initiated a collaboration with basket maker Antonio Battisti through reciprocal gestures of representation and construction. My paintings address the basket both as subject and as structure, treating the woven surface as a pictorial problem articulated through hatching and layering. In parallel, Battisti creates wicker structures that exceed their functional use, configuring themselves as spatial devices capable of containing and supporting the painted surface. These woven frames envelop the pictorial register of different moments of interaction with the artisanal process: the figure of the artisan, the object placed within the domestic space, the raw vegetal matter prior to transformation.

In a larger-scale painting, these elements enter into dialogue with the visual genealogy of the Spanish bodegón and with iconographic traces of an archetypal Annunciation, in which the domestic sphere is invested with symbolic and cultural value. Everyday objects are not represented here as static still lifes, but as active agents within a continuity in which they expand through an abstract language, becoming themselves the landscape that contains them.

The booth is conceived as an architectural apparatus that stages relationships between art and craft, image and object, contemporary practice and vernacular knowledge. Intreccio/ Tratteggio is part of a broader investigation into the ways cultural production takes shape in peripheral geographies, bringing painting into relation with forms of knowledge that exist outside urban centers while remaining deeply rooted in broader histories of craft.

Antonio Battisti lives and works in Colli, a fraction of Monte San Giovanni Campano, where he learned the art of basket weaving through the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. His practice is based on the seasonal harvesting of young branches of elm, olive, and willow, and on a working methodology historically tied to agricultural labor. Once essential elements of the rural economy, these woven containers were progressively replaced by plastic; nevertheless, the continuity of the weaving gesture has allowed the practice to survive. Today, Battisti’s baskets are read as repositories of cultural memory—objects that incorporate landscape, manual skills, and ecological knowledge specific to the territory.

Text by Giulia Mangoni