Bortolossi Veneziano

The soul of Venice, the colors of the Orient.
Tales of light and textural alchemies.

It all begins with water: Venice is my compass, the place where colors do not merely reveal themselves but rise as fragrance, and fragrances become memory.


When the wind shifts, the course leads to Palmanova: a nine-pointed star, drawn by the Serenissima like a theorem in stone, teaching my gaze the discipline of form.


Between these two poles, lagoon and ramparts, I have listened to the old voices of merchants and maps no longer drawn: the Silk Road as a weave binding East and West, where every spice is a color and every fabric a language.


Photography was my first journey: studying light, the breath of slower times, seeking the point where the real ceases to be mere document and begins to turn into story.


But one day the images asked for weight, fissures, roughness: so I stepped beyond the lens’s glass and into matter, layering pigments and textures like tidal sediments.


In the studio, surfaces recall the lagoon’s seabeds: every layer holds a passage, every scratch a current, every glaze an echo of spices and silks borne by distant galleys.


Now my work follows a course that keeps my shores together: photography becomes matter, matter ...

Bortolossi Venenziano creates textural works through the stratification of epoxy resins and pigments; a process rooted in a long journey of visual inquiry that began with photography and culminated in the necessity for tactility and physical presence.

Born and raised in Palmanova — the star-shaped fortress city built by the Serenissima in 1593 as an eastern bulwark — the artist absorbed a dual aesthetic from childhood: the rational geometry of the fortress and an openness toward the East.
This heritage permeates his entire body of research: Palmanova as the perfect form, Venice as a crossroads of spices, colors, and merchants’ tales.
Fascinated by the narratives of Marco Polo and the contamination between distant worlds, he finds an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the lagoon continuum (stretching between Venice, Grado, Marano, and the Gulf of Trieste). The colors of the saltmarshes (barene) with their turquoise glazes and amber reflections, the golden hues of sunsets, the oxidation of metals, and the scents of brine and wood become the conceptual raw material for works that aspire to capture the complete sensory experience of the landscape.
Self-taught since the age of fifteen, the artist has traversed decades of rigorous...