Essays, Issue 9

Vittorio Marella

Layering Time

Words THEA HAWLIN

Photography DANIEL CIVETTA

There’s a fragment of shell lodged in one of Vittorio Marella’s paintings. It’s no accident. The closer you look, the more the Venetian lagoon reveals itself: shards of shell, grains of sand. The entire surface of the canvas is embedded with raw materials from the Italian artist’s natural environment. Marella’s works are deeply textured, each with their own richly worked skin. A mix of oil, acrylic, sand, and shells creates a base for each canvas that the artist builds himself. “The painting starts well before the painting,” he notes, smiling, “I do a layer, and then I ruin everything to the point that I almost erase it all, then I repaint and I strip it away, paint and strip away.” As he speaks, Marella gestures, and you can see his hands eager to itch at the canvas. Sometimes this process of painting and repainting becomes so intense he loses control: “You see here, I made a hole by mistake.” Every canvas holds its own history. One time, he found himself revising a canvas so many times that by the end, it had the ghost of four different works woven into its final form. Painting from a young age as he grew up in Venice, Marella learned by copying the great masters. Today, he’s past the point of seeking perfection; he’s aiming for something beyond it, working to undo his own hand. “I don’t want it to look like it’s painted,” he says, “I want it to look as if it’s something you’ve found in the sand, scorched by salt under the sun.” He strips away his own artistry to a point that what remains appears to emerge fully formed: a relic, a fossil, a found object.

Born in 1997 and raised on the Lido in the Venetian lagoon, Marella’s first love was science. Despite drawing from a young age, his heart was set on astronomy, the mysteries of the night sky. He studied astrophysics in Padua for four years before finally giving it up to pursue painting full-time. “Painting was a need, a necessity,” he notes, “I would have done it even if I didn’t want to in the end.” There’s no pretense, the world of art is somewhat overwhelming, it’s not one he ever thought he’d be a part of. He’s not seeking anything other than answers to his own questions: “Art was the most intimate way of reaching my aim, a desire to discover the world.” Spirituality, a sense of meaning, a deeper relationship with nature, is all he’s searching for; it’s why astronomy was his first love: “An astronomer doesn’t have anything if they don’t have light, and what does a painter have?”

Da Vinci might be too lofty a comparison, but we’re talking about a boy who, with no academy training, began imitating Tintoretto at the age of 16. An illustrator father didn’t hurt, but it was his desire for knowledge that moved him forward, an urge to understand the world in which we live in all its forms, to unlock the secrets of how paint and fabric can be transformed into something to be revered. Dedicating himself to painting full-time, he turned his astronomer’s eye to the world around him. “I don’t invent anything,” he says blankly, “it disturbs me if I invent things because there’s no need to invent anything, everything that already exists is beautiful as it is.” His subjects emerged like strange constellations. His first exhibition in Venice, “Moving Stillness,” captured scenes from the everyday life of the floating city in 2021. Marella painted lone figures in moments of contemplation during their daily commutes. Through his compositions, the weaving of the vaporetto lines across the lagoon waters was elevated; the lines and curves of the boat’s metal body were set as a stage, a sequence of shadows. The back of a girl’s head as she looks out to the lagoon, the arch of a man’s back as he leans against the side of the boat, the glimpse of a reflection in a wing mirror. Intimate photographic snapshots of the city are shown in a way that many had never seen before.

When we speak, it’s in Venice. After a year living abroad and working in London, he needs a break from the city. In Italy again, it’s as if the pull of the lagoon tide brought him back; he couldn’t stay away. There’s something about this place; it’s in his bones, all of his artworks return to it. We meet at a bar near his studio in the Dorsoduro district. He’s famished. At times, work becomes all-consuming; he loses track of time. He’s still recovering from last year when he ended up creating a large-scale canvas for the Venice Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Art: “I put everything else after it. It frightened me because I liked being that immersed.” He turned the work around in just two months, all 4.5 x 4.5 meters of it, but it took a toll. “Now I’m a little better,” he notes, “because I know if I don’t eat, I won’t paint.”

From the bar, we walk to his studio. He pauses to unlock the large curved garage door, and the metal cover rattles up. Ducking under the half-opened entrance, we instantly come face-to-face with another huge work in progress. It makes his Biennale painting look small, composed of four enormous canvases strapped together. For now, in the lower right-hand corner, all that’s emerged against the background is the roughly sketched-out body of a girl reclining on the sand. The building is long, two interconnected rooms, bare, except for the canvases on the walls. At one end, there’s a small nook with a sofa, some bookcases, a trumpet hanging on the wall, and a dartboard. He tells me his friends like to spin each other around until they’re dizzy and then take turns throwing wall nails at the bullseye. A palette full of sand and paint sits balanced on a tray in front of another canvas in progress. To the left, another room opens out as a quasi-gallery space. His painting from the Venice Pavilion, Under the Weight of a Heavy Sun (2024), hangs on the wall.