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In an art world often driven by immediacy, Valerio Zezur is taking a different route. His paintings do not offer themselves all at once. They are layered, rough, sometimes wounded surfaces that seem to have existed before the viewer encountered them.Born in Ukraine in 2001 and now based in Italy, the young Italian-Ukrainian contemporary artist is developing a body of work centred on memory, identity, belonging and transformation. Rather than treating painting as a purely visual exercise, Zezur approaches the surface almost as an archaeological site: something to build, damage, cover and uncover again.
Plaster, sand, fabric, wood, metals, natural elements, recovered materials, acrylic paint and gold leaf are among the materials that repeatedly enter his practice. The result is a form of mixed-media painting in which texture carries as much meaning as colour.
It is this physical relationship with material that is increasingly defining Zezur's artistic identity.
His work does not attempt to disguise cracks.
It gives them a function.
A visual language built from what remains
There is an immediate temptation to read Valerio Zezur's work exclusively through his biography.
That would be understandable, but incomplete.
His childhood in Ukraine was marked by loss and separation before his arrival in Italy and adoption. Those experiences later became part of his autobiographical book, Dentro l’incubo, oltre il buio (Inside the Nightmare, Beyond the Darkness), but Zezur's visual practice does not simply illustrate episodes from his life.
Instead, autobiography becomes raw material.
The personal is gradually translated into something less literal: surfaces that deal with vulnerability, memory, disappearance and the difficult question of what remains after identity has been repeatedly disrupted.
His own artistic statement describes a process based on constructing and destroying, covering and revealing, adding and removing. The finished work is not meant to achieve flawless balance. What interests Zezur is precisely the tension between control and freedom, memory and possibility.
This distinction matters.
There is a considerable difference between making art about trauma and developing a language capable of moving beyond the individual experience that produced it.
Zezur appears increasingly interested in the latter.
His works invite the viewer to enter spaces that may originate in his personal history but are ultimately concerned with more universal questions: the need to belong, the fear of being forgotten, emotional survival and the possibility of reconstructing oneself without erasing what came before.
Why gold matters in Valerio Zezur’s art
Gold frequently appears across Zezur's compositions, but its role is far removed from conventional associations with opulence.
For the artist, gold represents something closer to persistence.
It appears between damaged surfaces, beside darker areas or across irregular textures as a visual counterpoint to rupture.
In Zezur's vocabulary, gold is not there to make a wound beautiful. It suggests that a wound and value can occupy the same space.
That idea has become one of the clearest conceptual threads running through his practice: fragility does not disappear in the process of transformation. It remains visible.
The work therefore resists a simplistic narrative of overcoming adversity. There is no suggestion that darkness has been permanently defeated. Instead, many of the compositions seem concerned with the moment in which a person begins moving through it.
One of his works, Oltre il Buio — “Beyond the Darkness” — brings together several of the recurring elements in his practice: matter, fracture, memory, transformation and the possibility of renewal.
The story behind the name “Zezur”
Perhaps one of the most revealing details of the artist's identity is his name.
“Zezur” is not an invented signature designed for the art market.
It is the surname connected to his Ukrainian origins and to his biological mother.
Following his adoption in Italy, his legal surname changed. Years later, when painting became increasingly central to his life, he chose to recover Zezur as the name with which he signs his work.
In his autobiographical writing, the decision is described not as a rejection of his Italian identity but as an attempt to reconnect two parts of himself that had long seemed separated.
That makes the signature unusually relevant to understanding the work.
For many artists, the name in the corner of a canvas indicates authorship.
For Valerio Zezur, it also carries memory.
The tension between an identity acquired and an identity recovered mirrors much of what happens inside his paintings: fragments that do not disappear but are placed into a new structure.
From painting to a multidisciplinary practice
Zezur's recent development has also moved beyond the limits of the canvas.
Alongside his visual work, he is the author of the autobiographical project Dentro l’incubo, oltre il buio, available in multiple formats and languages. His artistic activity has expanded into writing, public conversations, exhibitions, performance and music, including the project Sono libero, developed with Mirko Giacomin as an extension of the themes explored in the book.
His recent trajectory has included exhibitions and cultural projects across Italy, with activity connected to cities including Milan, Turin, Padua, Rovigo, Lecco and Reggio Emilia, alongside international exhibition participation in Berlin and Tokyo, according to materials documenting his artistic programme.
It is still an evolving career, and that may be precisely what makes Zezur interesting to follow.
At 25, he is not presenting a finished artistic formula. The vocabulary is continuing to change.
Yet several elements are already recognisable: tactile surfaces, recovered matter, fractures, gold, the tension between darkness and light, and an insistence on treating memory not as an illustration of the past but as something physically present.
An emerging artist to watch
The contemporary art landscape is crowded with personal narratives. What may distinguish Valerio Zezur over time is whether he can continue turning biography into a language that remains compelling even when the viewer knows nothing about the person who created it.
His strongest works suggest that possibility.
They do not demand that the audience understand every chapter of his life before approaching them.
A cracked surface remains a cracked surface.
A discarded object has already lived another existence.
Gold catches light regardless of the story behind it.
Zezur brings those elements together and allows their histories to remain visible.
That approach places the young Italian-Ukrainian artist within a broader contemporary conversation about identity, material memory and reconstruction while giving him space to develop a vocabulary that is increasingly his own.
For an emerging artist, recognition is never determined by a single exhibition, book or moment of visibility. It is built through consistency — through the gradual transformation of instinct into research and research into a recognisable artistic language.
Valerio Zezur appears to be entering precisely that stage.
Not because his past automatically makes his art important.
But because he is beginning to find a visual language capable of existing beyond it.