"Diptych - Fellini’s La Dolce Vita: Steiner’s Speech" by Davide Querin
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Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 120 x 50 cm
Year: 2025
Price: $6600.00 USD
Status: available
In this compelling contemporary diptych, Davide Querin reinterprets the visual and cultural legacy of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, transforming its iconic imagery into a personal reflection on modern life, urban identity, and the fragility of appearances. On the left, Steiner appears in profile, his introspective presence set against a monumental, nocturnal Rome. The architectural forms, rendered in a restricted palette, evoke a city suspended between memory and contemplation. A telephone placed across the lower part of the composition introduces an everyday object into this cinematic landscape, creating an unexpected connection between the depicted world and the viewer’s own experience. On the right, the familiar grandeur of the Trevi Fountain and its surrounding architecture is disrupted by a dramatic, jagged fracture. The rupture divides the composition, juxtaposing the permanence of cultural landmarks with the possibility of their disintegration. Two figures seated beside the fountain occupy this unstable setting, their presence introducing a human dimension to the architectural upheaval. The contrast between monochromatic architecture and vivid colour, stillness and fragmentation, recognition and dislocation gives the work its distinctive visual tension. Rather than simply illustrating a cinematic reference, Querin uses Fellini’s cultural legacy as a starting point for an independent artistic interpretation of Rome and its symbolic presence in the collective imagination. Exhibited in Que reste-t-il de La Dolce Vita in Rome, the work brings together cinematic memory, architectural imagery, and contemporary figurative painting in a composition that rewards sustained observation.
Why collect this work?
A jagged white breach cuts through a recognisable Roman landmark, turning cinematic recollection into an image of cultural memory under pressure.
- Querin describes his practice as combining remembered images, imagination and nonliteral space. Here, the title’s reference to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita anchors that approach in a specific film while allowing its fragments to separate and collide.
- In the photograph, a dark, largely monochrome church scene occupies the left panel, while the Trevi Fountain fills the right. A telephone crosses the central seam below, but the painted rupture interrupts the fountain, making fracture more forceful than connection.
- Catalogued as oil on canvas, the diptych uses sharply bounded tonal areas to distinguish buildings, figures and night sky. Oil can accommodate both opaque passages and layered light; Querin reports using glazing to build transparency.
- Dated 2025, the painting is particularly useful for considering how cinema survives through selected props, faces and locations rather than complete narrative. Its divided format makes that partial transmission visible.
About the Artist
Davide Querin
Davide Querin is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Rome, IT.
Nationality: Italian
My work explores interior, subtle, and distant worlds—spaces that cannot be described literally, but instead reveal themselves through perception,...
