Project

“Dai ragni ai morti era il regno della metamorfosi” (“From spiders to the dead, it was the realm of metamorphosis”) is a handmade book composed of a single foldable paper sheet.
A 3 colour screen print, edition of 100\100 printed in the winter of 2024 on Fedrigoni Sahara paper. (50×50 cm)
This work is part of the book series  PMP created by the wise roman printer Pietro Pasa for Litchis Edizioni

The art is inspired by Roberto Calasso’s “Il cacciatore celeste” a wonderful book on how humans developed from hunted to hunters and the relentless evolution of the Gods. 

“Riunione di condominio” a temporary installation on bed sheets. Some of the most notorious birds of Rome chatting and complaining, on top of this incredible roof right above the city.
The work was realized for the summer art and architecture festival organized by OpenHouse a special thanks Luigi Castelli and Giovanni Pasa for the photos. 

In the winter of 2019 I was commissioned by the I.C.C.D to create an herbarium, even if “alberarium” define it better. The title is : Memorie Viventi alberario della grande Guerra (Leaving Memories Treearium of the Grate War)
This book finds it place in a wider project about the first World War and the Remembrance parks of Italy. The Remembrance parks where created after the grate war as “living cemetery” each tree planted was a dead soldier. Trees feed human memory with their own life-cycle, creating a continuity between life and death.
Basically I integrated scientific illustrations and captions with some sort of photographic album, invading the surface of the photos with my painting, creating an analogic dialogue between plants and photos (living memories) insisting on the similarities between trees and the portrayed subjects.
All the trees were chosen by a botanist for the institute, I selected the photos from the I.C.C.D vast archive. I than printed the digital files on to some old paper found in an abandoned typography and glued them on a painted support prepared for this. All the illustrations are realized with acrylic paint, the black background evoke the funerary theme and enhance the light of the living focusing the attention on the subjects.

SELEZIONE NATURALE (Natural selection) it’s my first anthology book.
Published by Zooo print and press in 2019.
Enveloped in a double face poster, in the 150 pages of the book there’s a selection of the best works of the last 10 years: murals, paintings, watercolours, drawings, etchings, beasts and adventures.
In May the book was premiered in Bologna with an exhibition hosted at Squadro stamperia, where they realized a series of 3 screen-prints for the occasion.
Selezione naturale is now sold out!

Hitnes’s The Image Hunter project culminated with an exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary arts at the College of Charleston in the fall of 2018.
The realization of the whole exhibition took me 6 months during a residency in Charleston South Carolina, between 2017 and 2018.
I was able to retrace the steps of my voyage done in 2015 and focus on John James Audubon’s connections with the wild and the birds, creating my own connections and allowing this research to form my creative practice.
The exhibition consists of 15 shadow-boxes, 53 etchings and drawings, 2 hand-made books 5 artist sketch books, objects and ephemera collected along the 2015 journey.

After Charleston the Exhibition travelled to other locations:
Lake Charles Historic City Hall Arts & Cultural Center, Lake Charles, LA. February 22 – April 27, 2019
Provo City Library at Academy Square, Provo City, UT. October 4 – November 27, 2019
High Desert Museum, Bend, OR. October 17, 2020 – February 21, 2021
Costal Discovery Museum, Hilton heads, SC. April – June 2022

This part of the exhibition focus on the deep aesthetic bound between observing and painting.
The subjects of the 15 shadow-boxes are the birds painted in the murals of the journey in 2015 and the locations and the emotions inspired by the ”hunt” of this birds.
In every piece the techniques used by the artist are many but mainly watercolours and acrylics.
The layers of paper are the core of the boxes, first painted and than patiently cut, the different type of sheets are kept together and layered by gator-foam and restauration glue.
The distance between the layers enhance the perception of the painting, and drives the eyes of the viewer in some kind of set design created to observe the “soul” of the birds.
Pieces of natural materials taken during the voyage were cleaned and placed in each box showing the real connection between the location and the observation of the birds, transforming this pieces in to some kind of diorama of my adventures.
Each wooden box has been hand painted whit acrylic and sealed behind poly.

“FRAGMENTS OF THE BIRDS OF AMERICA”

This part of the Image Hunter exhibition is centred on the book The Birds of America. This series of etched birds are my own Birds of America.
The plates depict part of the personal record of the specimens observed during the voyage in 2015, each subject has been renamed with some story or fact related to its observation. Etched on irregular fragments of copper, the plates are no bigger than 2.5×2.5 in, the whole print work is done with the same technique as the printer Robert Havell reproduced Audubon’s watercolour for his magnificent book in 1827: etching and aquatint, in my work only the colouring is missing.
I etched and printed all the 53 plates in my studio in Rome and collected everything in a book: “Fragments of the Birds of America”. Hand bound into an edition of 9\9 precious and unique exemplars, each book has been composed with a different marbled paper and different colours for the leather binding of the spine.
The book is embedded in a larger cloth box with screen printed and relief decorations, this choice of format enhances the perception of miniature creating a playful contrast with the opulent size of the double elephant folio of Audubon’s The Birds of America.

In the winter of 2017 I travelled to the Amazon forest in Colombia.
I left with other tree artists Ericailcane, Bastardilla and DEM.
We stayed as guests of the Guacamaio for a month, our first idea was to gather ideas and materials for a book (eventually this book would came out in 2019) but we got back with much more, or less if you will. During our time in the Forest many events took place, but we could only scratch a really little part of the many surfaces of this green ocean of wonders and terrors.

Hasta ahi les puedo decir

Le chasseur et le graveur, a personal exhibition curated by Eric Surmont (Winterlong galerie), at Le Pilorì in Niort (FR) held in autumn 2016. There I exhibited only my calco-graphic works, a vast variety of my etchings and some xylography, everything etched and printed in my studio.
For the finissage of the exhibition I held a linocut workshop for two days, together with Ericailcane and Bastardilla.