Massimo Borrelli is an Italian visual artist based in Bratislava. His practice investigates the dialogue between Roman wall painting and contemporary tragedy, producing works in which successive layers of oil and pigment embody, rather than represent, the mechanisms of collapse.

​

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

 

Growing up between Pompeii and Paestum, sites where architectural monumentality and geological catastrophe materially coexist, he absorbed a paradox that became central to his pictorial language: beauty endures precisely because destruction has buried and preserved it.

​

Borrelli's practice makes visible the slow, cumulative processes through which architectural, political and social structures are gradually submerged, a stratification of memory and materiality held in permanent tension between order and chaos.

 

The lava that entombed Pompeii operates as a civilizational archetype, a stark reminder that collapse unfolds incrementally, while those living through it often fail even to recognize the ash already falling around them.