Leo Battistelli: água viva: Texto crítico: Leonel Kaz

Leo Battistelli: Living Water

“We are energy, light, yet we do not see ourselves that way. We are beings of light”, says Leo Battistelli, who has lived in Rio de Janeiro for 20 years, having come from Rosario, Argentina, where he studied Fine Arts and worked as a lifeguard. From his family ancestry and professional experience, he gathered into memory the bubbles of water, lichens, and plants—and transformed them into “living waters” made of ceramic and porcelain. His works are found in museums, collections, and buildings in Buenos Aires, Punta del Este and Miami, some on a monumental scale, such as the 2,400 stars, galaxies, and nebulae in porcelain, gold, and platinum that he created for a 240 m² reflecting pool at the entrance of a building in Puerto Madero.

Leo is an aquatic being now immersed, from water to fire, in the craft of ceramics, from which he draws color, imagination, and delirium. It is within this universe that he molds the world into curvilinear and three-dimensional forms: at one moment, scales become visible; at another, they are petals, fossilized flowers, lichens—all imbued with an acute sense of contemporaneity.

This is an art that stems from a distant source. Perhaps from water itself, where everything originates: beings and things showing that we are, planetarily and biologically, one and the same. The artist is attuned to this new ethic of human existence in relation to nature, to this alchemy between humans and plants (for like us, trees also speak to one another), as well as to the spiritual values of shamanic and Candomblé rituals. These elements appear already at the entrance of the exhibition, in the piece Iemanjá (2025), made of vertical strands of blown crystal beads, and in Sobrenatural [Supernatural] (2015), a “card figure” based on an Amazonian legend that speaks of man as the origin of water and forests.

The exhibition features walls covered with Líquens [Lichens] (produced between 2019 and 2025), shaped through varied ceramic and porcelain techniques, their translucent, lush surfaces and subtle hues evoking the absence of what they represent—an element essential to healthy life in large cities. There is a Pôr do sol [Sunset] (2025), seven meters wide, formed by open ceramic circles composing a radiant panel beside a molecule of Gelo [Ice] (2024), (in which hydrogen and oxygen are rendered in ceramic through a spectrum of colors). Three objects feature internal luminosity: a large grape seed or Pepita (2022/2025), in Spanish, made of porcelain that opens, sprouting light and silver; a Respiro [Breath] (2025) in wood with porcelain bubbles resembling water effervescence; and Hexagonoro (2019/2025), the seventy porcelain, gold, and platinum palettes that generated the 2,400 stars now covering the reflecting pool in Argentina mentioned above. There is also Orvalho [Dew] (2025), with multiple drops of velvety white porcelain suspended in the air, beside Coluna [Column] (2025), an immense pendant of deep blue, like a geometric being from another dimension. And there are Ninhos [Nests] (2019) made from birds’ nests collected near the artist’s home.

Indeed, Leo lives amid the Atlantic Forest, 400 meters above sea level in Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by crystalline water flowing from rocks and leafy trees. His work, therefore, is not merely the result of an intellectual process, but of a way of being and living. It is a way of being inhabited by an imagination conceived not by the cerebral cortex of an individual, but by the plurality of perceptions of what surrounds him.

Physicist Marcelo Gleiser, in his text for the artist’s object-book As esferas da percepção [The Spheres of Perception] grasped Leo Battistelli’s work in the same way: “When we look at Battistelli’s work, the dance of colors, the interplay of symmetry and asymmetry, the blending of molecular science with a distorted and expanded experience of reality, we catch a glimpse of our essence, flirting, even if for fleeting moments, with the mystery of Creation”.

Leonel Kaz is a journalist and curator.