In light of the duo exhibition DUO ACCESS, presented at Buysse Gallery from 10 January to 22 February 2026, this article focuses on the work of Filippo Moroni, shown in dialogue with Tycjan Knut. The exhibition brings together two distinct yet complementary practices, each engaging with surface, materiality, and restraint through different formal languages.
Within this context, we place Filippo Moroni (b. 1996, Castiglione del Lago, Italy) at the center of an ongoing conversation that engages both his material practice and its broader art-historical framework. The text offers a closer look into Moroni's understanding of painting as a condition shaped by pressure, surface, and containment, while situating his work within a lineage that resonates with Belgian material painting, notably the work of Bram Bogart, as well as with Italian post-war figures such as Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, and Turi Simeti. Rather than proposing direct comparisons, the discussion traces shared concerns around material intervention, surface activation, and the refusal of illusion, positioning Moroni's practice as a contemporary extension of these historical trajectories.
Filippo Moroni, centered on the ongoing Schiacciato series. Situated within an ultra-contemporary pictorial discourse, Moroni's work enters the Belgian context with a language that is both materially rigorous and historically grounded. His practice approaches painting as a condition shaped by pressure, surface, and containment, rather than by gesture or representation.
Moroni's work unfolds at the threshold between painting and object. Working primarily with polyurethane foam, chenille velvet, and wood, he constructs dense pictorial fields through processes of compression and fixation. Soft matter is pressed against rigid supports, producing surfaces marked by folds, striations, and accumulations that function as traces of force and time. What is presented is not an image to be read, but a surface to be encountered, one that absorbs light and modulates perception according to its surrounding conditions.
This approach situates Moroni within a distinctly Italian post-war lineage that approached painting as a sculptural field rather than a pictorial illusion. Artists such as Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, and Turi Simeti redefined the canvas as a site of physical intervention, where tension, protrusion, and repetition replaced composition and representation. In their work, gesture was displaced in favour of structure, allowing surface to become an active spatial condition rather than a passive support.
At the same time, Moroni's material sensibility resonates strongly with a Belgian tradition of material painting, most notably the work of Bram Bogart, who treated paint itself as a sculptural substance. Bogart's dense, constructed surfaces foregrounded matter as form, collapsing the distinction between painting and object. Moroni extends this logic into a contemporary register, replacing paint with compressible materials while retaining a comparable commitment to surface as a site of physical construction.
As Louis Buysse observes, "Moroni's work naturally aligns with this Italian tradition in which the painted surface is manipulated as a sculptural event. Like Castellani, Bonalumi, or Simeti, the work is not built through image but through pressure, repetition, and restraint." At the same time, Buysse notes, "there is a clear affinity with Bram Bogart, in the sense that material itself becomes the agent that sculpts the pictorial field." Yet Moroni departs from these precedents by introducing contemporary materials and a heightened sensitivity to tactility and absorption.
Where Castellani and Bonalumi activated the canvas through tension, industrial precision, and structural protrusion, and where Bogart relied on the physical mass of paint, Moroni softens the logic of relief by working with compressible matter and textile surfaces. "Moroni goes a step further," Buysse continues, "by interweaving this structural language with the material availability of today. The use of velvet fundamentally alters the way the work interacts with light." Rather than reflecting light outward, the surfaces absorb it, producing subtle chromatic shifts that depend on luminosity and colour temperature. Light is not staged theatrically but held within the folds of the surface, shifting quietly according to its intensity and warmth.
Moroni himself describes velvet not as a surface, but as a form of skin. "I think of velvet as a kind of skin rather than a surface," he notes. "The darker areas are intentional and come from layering pigment and working the material under pressure. For me, these darker zones can feel like traces of sweat, something that emerges through effort, time, and physical contact, rather than a color applied on top." In this sense, the work records a bodily engagement with material, where compression becomes a register of presence. As Louis Buysse reflects, the dialogue extends beyond material treatment alone and unfolds as an exchange between surface and the deeper meaning of physical intervention. The work does not merely bear the marks of process; it retains the memory of contact, effort, and duration, positioning the pictorial field as a site where material and corporeal experience converge.
Within this framework, Moroni's Schiacciato works can be understood as ultra-contemporary extensions of Italian spatial painting and European material abstraction. The wall becomes a site of containment rather than expansion, and painting operates not as an optical proposition but as a material condition shaped by pressure, time, and density. What remains consistent across generations is a shared refusal of illusion and narrative, replaced instead by an ethics of surface, restraint, and sustained attention.
