Biography

Massimo Borrelli is an Italian visual artist based in Bratislava. His practice investigates the structural relationship between Roman wall painting and the mechanics of collapse, producing works in which successive layers of oil and pigment do not represent but enact the processes by which civilizations are buried, preserved and only partially recovered.

​

Born in Salerno, Borrelli survived the 1980 Irpinia earthquake as a child, an event that established his understanding of collapse not as metaphor, but as lived condition.

 

Growing up between Pompeii and Paestum, sites where architectural monumentality and geological catastrophe occupy the same stratum, he encountered a paradox that became central to his pictorial language: that endurance and destruction are not opposites, but consecutive phases of a single process.

​

His paintings do not illustrate this condition: they perform it. Each work accumulates and erases, sediments and fractures, producing surfaces that resist full legibility and exist in a permanent state of incomplete excavation.