Nicole Ba (born Nicoletta Battaggia) was born in Venezia, where she attended the liceo artistico and later graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in the Decoration program. After her studies she moved into graphic design and teaching, covering Painting Disciplines and Art History. Starting in 2004 she moved to the province of Roma, where she continued teaching at art high schools and turned her attention to Christian iconographic painting, an ancient practice she loves for its potential to represent the invisible. Since 2021 she's been co-founder of the small shadow theater company "Sulla Nave di Ulisse." Her interest in shadows may seem, at first glance, at odds with her sensitivity and fascination with the incorporeal, but shadow is in fact what comes closest to the essence of reality — form without body, pure two-dimensionality. More recently she's turned to painting-based artistic research. Long drawn to the ethereal insubstantiality of air and the poetic power of the graphic mark, her work reflects on the fragility of the artistic object as an allusion to the vulnerability and impermanence of things born of human hands. A consistent stylistic feature of her work is the semi-transparency of the paper, which is treated, manipulated, scratched, and painted on both sides: on one side, oil paint leaves visible the spontaneity of quick brushwork through drips and marks; on the other side, the artist works with a slower graphic gesture, retracing the marks and unevenness of the layer beneath, made legible thanks to the paper's transparency. Through this process, the artist merges both sides of the sheet into a single pictorial whole, guiding the eye on a visual journey between front and back, inside and outside, leaving open the question of where the painting truly originates.