For Italian visual artist and printmaker Antonio Motta, printmaking is not a process of control but a practice of surrender. Ink does not simply rest on the surface. It merges with the material, takes on unpredictable forms and transforms itself through every interaction. What others might call errors, Motta treats as openings. His monotypes respond to him as much as he responds to them, creating an ongoing dialogue between intention and accident.
In his words, mistakes become unavoidable because they are essential. They feed the work rather than obstruct it. They return not as failures, but as new opportunities. Motta often describes his tools as speaking their own language, one that he is responsible for listening to, even when the syntax is ungrammatical. This philosophy sits at the heart of his evolving practice.
Monotype, for Motta, is a site of passage. He likens it to a train station where delays pile up, not out of frustration, but to allow more time to observe everyone waiting on the platform. Images pass through, linger briefly and depart. What remains are traces of movement, fragments of thought and the textures of fleeting encounters.
His 2024 series ‘Butterflies’ opened the door to an imagined alternative world, one that hovered between delicacy and transformation. In 2025, his new body of work titled ‘Ruins’ exposes the terrain that his earlier images abandoned. These prints present a landscape where the future and present coexist, dissolving into each other with clarity and quietness. The monotypes in Ruins act as glimpses of possible interactions, small openings that gesture toward new aesthetic and conceptual directions. They are neither conclusions nor answers, but beginnings.
Motta hints that 2026 has not yet spoken. The current works serve as an outlet, a transitional space in which experiments unfold without needing to resolve themselves. They point forward without predicting the shape of what comes next.
Throughout his practice, Motta returns to one idea: there is a difference between making mistakes and doing the wrong thing. Mistakes contribute to knowledge. Wrong actions simply reinforce a false sense of certainty. His prints attempt to stay on the side of discovery, allowing the unfamiliar to shape each decision.
Born in Udine in 1998 and trained at the Academies of Venice and Brera, Motta works with traditional and experimental materials including nylon, tissue paper and bubble wrap. He selects subjects based on unsuccessful print trials and builds his visual worlds from what others might discard. The Butterflies series and the Ruins collection form two sides of the same inquiry, one searching for a world to inhabit and the other revealing the landscapes that have been left behind. This creates a delicate veil through which viewers can look without feeling intrusive.
Motta’s monotypes have been exhibited in international print triennials and biennials in Serbia, Russia, Ukraine and Egypt. His work continues to evolve through risk, intuition and the persistent presence of the unexpected.
