DOUBLE WITNESS

Solo exhibition by David Bell
N9VE, Sanremo, Italy
27–29 September 2025

Double Witness presented a body of work that investigates how painting can operate as a mode of contemporary witnessing. The exhibition brought together large-scale abstracts, trompe-l’œil “Painted Histories,” and hybrid works embedding video screens (“pixies”), creating layered encounters between image, document, and digital evidence.

The works examine the tension between emotional abstraction and historical record: from the destruction of cultural heritage to environmental contamination and contemporary warfare. By pairing painted reconstructions of documents with immersive abstract surfaces, the exhibition explored how memory is constructed, suppressed, and reactivated through visual means.

Designed as a clear, linear route, the installation invited visitors to move between affective experience and documentary detail, prompting reflection on what it means to witness an event through both painting and recorded media.

Across the exhibition, the works engage with:

  • Historiographic reconstruction – layered paintings built from maps, documents, and archival fragments

  • Video-painting hybridity – embedded screens that create reflexive loops between documentary footage and painted imagery

  • Questions of witness – how events are remembered, mediated, silenced, or obscured

  • Material intelligence – meticulous painted surfaces that mimic paper, print, and photographic processes

This approach positions painting as both a research method and a site of critical enquiry, bringing together aesthetic, historical, and technological strands within a unified visual language.

Selected Works

Hybrid and large-scale paintings

  • The Terror (2024) – 100 x 100 cm, acrylic and drawing materials on canvas

  • Civilisation (2024) – 100 x 100 cm, acrylic and drawing materials on canvas with embedded video

  • Toxic Legacy (2024) – 100 x 100 cm, acrylic, drawing materials and collage on canvas

  • Surveillance Fish (2024) – 100 x 100 cm, acrylic and drawing materials on canvas with embedded video

  • Massacre at Izium 2022 (2024) – 100 x 100 cm, acrylic, drawing materials and collage on canvas with embedded video

Painted Histories

  • Postcard from Cannes (2025) – 38 × 28 cm, acrylic and ink on panel

  • Postcard from The Terror (2025) – 40 × 29 cm, acrylic and ink on panel

  • Postcard from Palmyra (2025) – 40 × 30 cm, acrylic and ink on panel

  • Postcard from Windscale (2025) – 40 × 30 cm, acrylic and ink on panel