The exhibition opens with a question: how can a photographic image, which by its very nature always shows something, make visible what cannot be seen? It is from this paradox that Rossana Battisti, known as Roxy Beat, develops her artistic research, creating photographs that begin to take shape long before they reach the lens.

At a time when artificial intelligence has made it possible to generate images of non-existent realities in just a few moments, Rossana Battisti’s approach appears almost like a mirror image of this process. What in her photographs may seem impossible, surreal or artificially constructed is instead the result of a physical, hands-on process: every scene is actually built, every element carefully selected and arranged, and every image emerges from the encounter between matter, bodies, objects and space. It is not digital simulation that invents a reality, but the artist who physically constructs an imaginary one in order to photograph it.

The construction process continues even after the shutter is released, with analogue practice forming an integral part of the work. Rossana Battisti develops her own film and intervenes directly on the photographs through printing, colouring, collage and the layering of materials. The images may be printed on photographic paper or on vintage papers taken from old books, and subsequently painted, assembled or worked on by hand and machine. Photography thus becomes matter and surface: another space for layering and transformation.

It is within this tension between the real and the unreal that one of the distinctive qualities of Rossana Battisti’s photography emerges. Her images seem to document something that has happened, yet what they document is a reality the artist has first imagined and constructed. Photography, therefore, does not simply record the world: it sees a possible world.

ARGENTO LUNA brings together a selection of works united by a particular quality of light. It is not the direct, uncompromising light of the sun, which exposes and defines everything, but the more delicate and ambiguous light of the moon: silvery, diaphanous, capable of illuminating without fully revealing. A light that leaves room for the imagination and transforms whatever it touches.

At the heart of the exhibition is the theme of personal memory, expressed through a constant presence: in every photograph, the artist is there, but never as the subject of a conventional self-portrait. Rossana Battisti enters the scenes she constructs, inhabits them, and becomes part of the magical worlds she has imagined and brought into being. Her presence is fixed in a theatrical, often hieratic manner, merging with the scene while leaving a trace: an autobiographical element that runs through the entire body of work, connecting places, people, objects and situations that might otherwise seem unrelated, held together by an energy suspended in time.

This is not a memory that is simply preserved, but one that is reconstructed and transformed. The desire to hold on to what is ephemeral takes shape through the creation of new realities, in which memory can escape the passage of time and assume an unexpected form.

Analogue photography also plays a part in this process: the silver salts contained in film become, metaphorically, a material capable of fixing time and preserving what might otherwise disappear.
The title ARGENTO LUNA (“Moon Silver”) stems precisely from the encounter between the photosensitive matter of film, its silver salts, and the moonlight that accompanies the artist’s gaze.

Rossana Battisti
Roxy Beat

Rossana Battisti (Terni, 1978) describes her practice as “emotional photography,” characterised by a strong evocative quality. Her work explores dreams, the invisible and the unconscious through intimate, conceptual and often autobiographical images, in which nature, twilight poetry, symbols and memory become recurring elements.

Self-portraiture takes on a particular form of distance within her practice: the artist often represents herself in the third person, transforming the self-portrait into a means of reflecting on her own identity and, more broadly, on life itself. Inner journeys and autobiographical experience thus intertwine with an investigation into the ability of the image to evoke what is not immediately visible.

Her work has been presented in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including Portraits Ohne Granzen at Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin (2021–22); Fuoco Fatuo, a 2024 solo exhibition in Rome; and, most recently, the prestigious Arles Off Festival (2026 edition).

In 2022, she received a Special Mention in the Single Shot section for Autoritratto – Dance Dance Dance as part of Fotografia al Femminile Bresciani Visual Art. Her work and artistic research have also been featured in Italian and international magazines and publications dedicated to contemporary and analogue photography.