Filippo Antonello

Filippo Antonello (b. 2002, Lugano, Switzerland) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Of Peruvian and Italian heritage, he holds a BA in History and Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and an MA from the University of the Arts London. 

Antonello’s approach to image-making resists easy categorisation – embracing contradiction, material alchemy, and intellectual rigour in equal measure. Using bleach and ink on unconventional textiles such as velvet, denim, and corduroy, he meticulously alters the surface until something new, and often unexpected, emerges. For Antonello, destruction is not an end, but a beginning. In his experimentation with photography, he began to seek light not as a thing to be applied, but as something waiting to be uncovered. Rather than painting from white to dark, he starts with a surface already saturated – with layered colours, with palpable material texture. His canvas is dyed with presence, then slowly stripped back, unveiling that very light that was hiding underneath.

Bleach is his tool. Not used for its purity, but for its violence– its very ability to strip through. The volatile agent becomes his brush - eating through the material, demanding surrender and yet resisting destruction. It makes him cautious whereas other media would let him roam. Each mark carries risk, each gesture requires trust; too much control makes the work rigid, too little, and the image vanishes. But even with caution, there is a tenderness, a sense of being held, not just by the work but by the absence it makes space for. Like history, he moves backwards – excavating, erasing, exposing what was always submerged in the unseen.