About the artist

About — Davide Campanella

About the artist

Davide Campanella
is led by his own hands.


Davide Campanella is an artist and photographer based in Paris. His work is made with a thermal printer, assembled piece by piece, and scanned by hand.

He grew up in Belgium, the child of immigrants: his father's family left Sicily seventy years ago when his grandfather came to work in the Belgian mines; his mother came from Poland. Movement, displacement, building a life from fragments — these things were already in him before he ever picked up a camera.

These pieces began with frustration. Unable to afford large-format printing, Davide started laying out grids in a computer program — saving each section of an image separately, printing every piece through the thermal printer, then assembling them by hand into something larger. The printer's heat is inconsistent by nature. The contrast shifts. The seams show. He kept all of it.

"I came to a point I had been led to by myself."

Before Paris, he pursued interior architecture and graphic design — studies he had to leave before finishing, unable to fund his way through. He spent three years building exhibitions in an art gallery, baked bread, delivered packages by bike. Lack of money was a constant; so was the making.

He arrived in Paris with almost nothing. People assumed him a fashion photographer. He played along, shot editorials and campaigns, and slowly understood it wasn't where he needed to be.

The series is where everything converges: the spatial thinking, the grid sensibility, the making with hands. The subjects are intimate — flowers, bodies, everyday objects — rendered in black-and-white with a poetic, romantic charge. Each print is unique. The thermal process ensures it.