About me

A Sicilian, Ernesto Mistretta brings together architecture, design and painting, shaped by his long experience as Art Director of the Atelier Jean Nouvel. For him, architecture, design and painting are elements of a single journey, in which these disciplines influence and nourish one another.

For Mistretta, painting has become the natural evolution of a process that began almost as a game, using the AutoCAD software. He worked on the textures of buildings as if they were two-dimensional paintings, thereby discovering just how blurred the boundaries between the disciplines were and opening up a field for experimentation. For Mistretta, every canvas is like an architectural project taking shape. The artwork is the result of a dialogue between method, technique and constraints.

From the world of architecture, he has brought the themes of transparency, modularity, repetition and technological innovation into his painting practice. From the world of design, he has inherited a sense of scale, simplicity, precision and solidity: qualities that recur in his works, which are simple in appearance but underpinned by profound complexity.