Barbara Visciano is a visual artist working where painting meets natural process. In her ongoing series Quadri Indeterminati, the canvas is given over to earth, time and chance before being reclaimed through paint.

Barbara Visciano was born in Livorno and lives and works in Fauglia (Pisa), Italy. After training in information technology, she chose to follow her artistic vocation, studying oil painting with Ferruccio Rosini and continuing her research under Angelo Foschini. Her work began in figuration — centred on the human figure and the relationship between gesture, emotion and narrative — and evolved over time toward an abstract, matter-based practice concerned with the relationship between the human, nature and time.

Since 2021 she has been developing the series Quadri Indeterminati (“Indeterminate Paintings”), in which reclaimed canvases are buried in the ground and left to the action of natural elements, then reworked through painting. Her research revolves around transformation, memory and unpredictability, questioning the boundary between control and chance, and between the human and the natural.

She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad; in 2025 one of her works entered the permanent collection of the Museo Italiano dell’Immaginario Folklorico (Piazza al Serchio, LU). She is a founding member of the artist collective SKIMMERS.

My research stems from an interest in what happens when the artist’s intention meets what cannot be fully foreseen or controlled. I am drawn to the tension between order and unpredictability, between human gesture and natural processes, and to the way this relationship turns matter into experience and memory.

With the series Quadri Indeterminati (“Indeterminate Paintings”) I have developed a process in which I deliberately relinquish part of my control over the work. I use reclaimed fabrics that already carry a history of their own, and subject them to the prolonged action of the subsoil: earth, water, vegetation, insects, microorganisms and minerals act upon the surface, generating alterations, oxidations, deposits and traces that can be neither predicted nor replicated.

Unearthing marks a decisive passage: what began as an act of abandonment becomes one of observation and listening. I do not start from a neutral surface, but from matter that has already undergone a process. My pictorial intervention then works upon these traces — not to return them to a predetermined order, but to interpret them, amplify them and set them in relation through glazes, transparencies, marks and forms.

In this process, time is not merely what passes but a force that acts and transforms: matter becomes a site of sedimentation where the natural, the human and the accidental overlap.

The Quadri Indeterminati also reflect on our contemporary condition, in which the need to exercise control coexists with the impossibility of fully governing the processes we are part of. To accept the unpredictable does not mean renouncing intention, but acknowledging that the work — like reality itself — arises from the interaction between what we choose and what simply happens.

Through painting I therefore seek a form of unstable equilibrium, in which matter preserves the memory of its own passage and the work remains open, unrepeatable and in constant transformation.

Le Verità della Memoria – stage 3

Group show with SKIMMERS . Galleria Sztuki Nowy Warzywniak, Gdańsk, Poland

Prima Materia

Selected through open call . Palazzo Sforza Cesarini, Genzano di Roma, Italy

Doppia Essenza

Two-person show, painting and sculpture — curated by Jacopo Suggi . Sala delle Grasce, Pietrasanta (LU),

Italy

For enquiries, studio visits and available works, please get in touch.