Developing alongside over two decades of printmaking, Giulia Zaniol’s painting practice has evolved from earlier image-led works towards a materially driven enquiry rooted in encaustic. Recent paintings increasingly foreground process, surface and material transformation as active carriers of meaning.
Drawing on Venetian origins, family memory and the city’s unstable relationship with water and time, the works incorporate lace, damask and ornamental traces that reference histories of exchange, erosion and fragility. Surfaces fracture, dissolve and partially disappear, echoing unstable foundations and the precarity of inherited structures.
Through layers of beeswax, resin, pigment and embedded traces, the paintings move between image and object, exploring vulnerability, resilience and interdependence. In recent works such as Unseen Foundations, figures begin to loosen from the surface, increasingly extending towards sculptural and spatial forms.
