Old snow

Francesco De Panis is a painter renowned for his refined depictions of Italian landscapes. His works encompass the Tuscan countryside, rural landscapes from various regions, seascapes battered by raging seas, and dramatic scenes of forest fires, resulting in paintings of the highest technical standard.

Although his works are sometimes mistaken for hyperrealist paintings, De Panis is actually far removed from this pictorial trend. Hyperrealists, in fact, focus their attention on objects from contemporary reality—telephone booths, cars, industrial surfaces—exaggerating their presence to the point of revealing an almost hallucinatory and alienated dimension of reality, a sort of silent denunciation of the technological and urban condition of modern man.

De Panis's work firmly harks back to the figurative tradition of realism, understood not as cold, mechanical reproduction, but as balance, measure, and harmony. His paintings lack any desire to emphasize the alienness of the contemporary world; on the contrary, the landscape becomes a place of contemplation, silence, and temporal suspension.

His work ideally follows the path traced by the Flemish masters, pioneers of oil painting, whose technique was introduced to Italy by Antonello da Messina, revolutionizing the rendering of texture, light, and depth. Through his skillful use of oil on wood panel, De Panis revisits this historical lesson "the old fashioned way," elevating it to a level of extremely complex technique.

His painting doesn't seek spectacular effect or conceptual provocation, but rather springs from a profound inner calm, a slow and meditative pace. It is precisely this quiet, this distance from the noise of the present, that makes his landscapes extraordinary: images in which fidelity to reality becomes a vehicle for balance, silence, and authenticity, rather than alienation.