David Osbaldeston in the Studio, March 2026, photo Luana Rigolli

Extract from “Meet the artists, BSR Blog” -

In any city, but particularly in Rome, what often appears constant is the presence of a conspicuous authority where distinctions between the demarcation and politicisation of public space are difficult to avoid. These are diversions.

Sometimes diversions are to be tolerated or ignored like the litter of hazard tape. At other times confronted, as in the case of a shelter used by the homeless since being bricked up, or an armed soldier who demanded the deletion of the images I’d casually taken whilst under surveillance some distance from the Israeli embassy.

What became evident was a need in the studio to position each pair of paintings with photo documentation as posters in a bid to close the gap between the work and its wider context. So, the diversion isn’t just a literal but a metaphorical one, which infers more than one path is or isn’t possible.

To sum up, when I now settle on certain ideas to work with, I increasingly think less of them as definitions and more as vessels for association. What the city has given me to understand (with clarity) is that it isn’t just the things themselves as subjects which matter but their proximity, and the impetus to begin to saturate the work toward a more coherent psychic and physical effect. 

A diversion can of course also be a distraction, and it is this which might lead us somewhere entirely unintended.