Onlysattva is an Italian-British painter born in Milan and trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. He works in acrylic on canvas, building symmetrical compositions out of ornament: circles, triangles, borders and repeated marks, all drawn and painted by hand.

onlysattva draws on ornamental traditions that are usually kept apart, from Greek and Roman ornament to Amazonian and Mesoamerican patterns, and treats them as equal systems of knowledge rather than decoration. He is not quoting these traditions so much as looking for what they hold in common: a shared grammar of rhythm, symmetry and line that appears independently across cultures and centuries.

The work begins away from the canvas, picking up and combining ornaments wherever he finds them, then drawing and redrawing until only the essential lines remain. Painting itself is slow, and it is held by a daily practice of meditation: there is a right moment to make a mark, choose a colour, draw a line, and the discipline is learning to wait for it.

During his residency at GlogauAIR, onlysattva is making paintings meant to slow the  viewer down, so that standing in front of one of his works  feels closer to  meditating  than  reading an image. A return to the self is a return to love, and the paintings exist to hold open that space; the takeaway is less an idea than a state, arrived at through forms that belong to everyone.