Rome — Von Buren Contemporary on Via Giulia is set to open Overlap, a compelling duo exhibition featuring two award-winning Italian artists: Leonardo Blanco and Donatella Izzo. The vernissage will take place over two evenings — Thursday, May 7 and Friday, May 8, 2026, from 18:00 to 21:30 — with a presentation text by Anna Gasperini. The exhibition will remain on view until June 3, 2026.
At first glance, the pairing may seem an unlikely one. Blanco’s abstract paintings — dense with gesture, material and symbolic weight — stand in stark contrast to Izzo’s photography, which captures both the human figure and the natural world with an intimate, unadorned eye. Yet as the title suggests, an overlap emerges: not only in the visual dialogue between the two bodies of work, but in the shared reliance both artists place on the technique of layering, executed in strikingly different ways.
Blanco’s practice is rooted in a rigorous process of material and temporal accumulation. Working with inks and acrylics on supports ranging from wood to aluminum, he creates compositions that feel both deeply physical and emotionally charged. Each layer of paint, each gesture, contributes to a search for harmony and tension — a push and pull between contrast and affinity that animates the surface of the work. The result is painting that carries an existential and symbolic charge, where colour becomes a language in its own right.
Born in Santarcangelo di Romagna in 1968 and a citizen of San Marino, Blanco is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, sculpture and installation. His international credentials are formidable: he has exhibited in London, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Dubai, Beijing, Venice and at documenta 15 in Kassel. In 2009, he represented San Marino at the 53rd Venice Biennale. His works are held in prestigious collections worldwide, including the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, and the Water Cube Museum in Beijing. He also won a public commission for a monumental steel sculpture that now stands at the entrance to San Marino’s historic city centre.
Izzo brings a radically different but complementary approach to layering. For her contribution to Overlap, she presents two photographic series: the long-standing No-portraits project, which she has been developing for over a decade, and Post Eden // l’Ultra Natura, a more recent series devoted to the natural world.
No-portraits reimagines the traditional portrait by subjecting the photographic image to manual interventions — abrasion, painting, collage — before capturing the final shot. The result is a hybrid image that sits between photography and painting, reproducible yet infused with the material and sensorial qualities of handmade work. Post Eden // l’Ultra Natura takes a different approach: simple, close-up, one-off shots of nature that deliberately avoid any digital manipulation, finding depth in the directness of the encounter.
Born in Busto Arsizio in 1979 and now based in Milan, Izzo graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, where she immediately gravitated toward photography entwined with pictorial intervention. Over the years, she refined her hybrid technique — weaving painting, cuts, abrasions and collage into the photographic fabric itself. Alongside No-portraits, she has pursued The Dreamers, a “stricter” photographic project that has been exhibited internationally. In 2020, she was selected by the Cariplo Foundation for a solo exhibition at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan; in 2024, the DAV in Soresina dedicated a retrospective to her work.
Overlap promises to be a study in contrasts that resolve into harmony — two artists who, from opposite ends of the creative spectrum, arrive at a shared preoccupation with what lies beneath the surface. At Von Buren Contemporary, the meeting of Blanco’s material abstraction and Izzo’s layered photography offers visitors a rare chance to see how different forms of visual art can echo, challenge and ultimately enrich one another.
Photo credits: Von Buren Contemporary
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