Hio Rain: Balance, Oxymoron and Fragility in Contemporary Watercolour | NNC Gallery Challenge 2022 Winner

Hio Rain: the fragile architecture of balance

Who is Hio Rain?

Hio Rain is a contemporary artist based in Orbetello, Tuscany, and winner of the NNC Gallery Challenge 2022. His practice moves across illustration, painting, sculpture, photography and writing, developing a poetic and visual investigation around balance, paradox, weight, fragility and the unstable relationship between form and emotion.

Hio Rain is not only a name. It is an invented identity, an alternative personality, a rhetorical figure, an untied knot, a reflection. This is already important: before becoming a body of works, Hio Rain appears as a conceptual position. A way of looking. A distance from the ordinary name. A space where artistic research can exist with greater freedom.

According to the artist statement, Hio Rain was born in 1995, in Florence. The statement does not present this birth in a conventional biographical sense, but as the birth of an artistic figure shaped by architecture and by all the languages that contribute to the education of an architect. This detail is central to understanding the work. Hio Rain’s images do not simply occupy the sheet. They seem to measure it, test it, suspend it, wound it gently, and then rebuild it through minimal gestures.

A practice between architecture, drawing and emotional structure

Hio Rain’s research is rooted in the idea of balance. Not balance as decoration. Not balance as symmetry. Not balance as a comfortable solution. His work searches for balance rather than creating it.

This distinction matters.

In many of his works, balance appears as a condition to be negotiated. A form may seem too heavy for the space that holds it. A thin line may carry a dark mass. A delicate stain of watercolour may become an architectural volume. A small red trace may interrupt a pale field with the intensity of a wound or a signal.

The artist writes that he is obsessed with weights: in architectural composition, in matrix lines, in the marks left on paper, whether clean or dirty. This obsession is visible in the works. The paper becomes a site of tension. The forms are not illustrative in the traditional sense. They are not there to describe a scene. They behave like structures under pressure.

And yet, despite this pressure, the works remain quiet.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of Hio Rain’s visual language. The compositions are minimal, almost fragile, but never empty. Their silence is active. Their white space is not absence. It is air, resistance, pause, exposure.

Oxymoron: balance inside contradiction

The series Oxymoron is one of the key points through which NNC Gallery selected Hio Rain.

An oxymoron is a figure built from contradiction. In language, it places opposite meanings together. In Hio Rain’s work, the oxymoron becomes visual, spatial and emotional. The artist describes moments that are both inevitable and surprising, uncomfortable and almost serene. One prepares for the arrival of a storm, and yet the storm creates a state of mind that is not simply fear. It becomes a condition of suspended awareness.

The series searches for substantial balances inside apparent paradoxes. Different elements, different masses, consistencies, bodies, intensities, shapes, colours and even sounds are placed into a fragile form of communication.

In Ossimori 216 and Ossimori 217, both from 2021, watercolour and pencil on paper become tools for composing unstable equilibriums. Dark elements float or stand on thin lines. Pale masses dissolve into the sheet. The image seems to ask: how much weight can a line carry? How much silence can a form contain? How much fragility is needed before a structure becomes alive?

These works are small in scale, but they open a larger reflection. In contemporary art, especially in a time saturated with speed, production and visual excess, Hio Rain’s work asks for another kind of attention. It invites the viewer to slow down and to read the almost imperceptible relationship between gesture, pressure, surface and space.

Uncomfortable: the difficulty of being seen

The series Uncomfortable, also described as “look at me”, shifts the research toward fragility, exposure and the difficulty of sharing fear.

Here discomfort is not treated as spectacle. It is not dramatized. It is held at a distance, almost as if the work were trying to make visible the exact moment before something becomes speakable.

The artist describes Uncomfortable as a series about instants of inadequacy in relation to the preconceived and distorted vision of the moment itself. This is a subtle but powerful idea. Sometimes discomfort does not come only from what is happening. It comes from the way we believe we should react, appear, resist, perform or explain ourselves.

In Uncomfortable 354 and Uncomfortable 356, the forms seem to hover between body and architecture, between mark and organism. The grey and black masses have weight, but they are not fixed. The line remains vulnerable. The paper breathes around the image. In one work, a red element enters the composition like a small but decisive event: almost a flower, almost a wound, almost a signal.

For collectors and curators interested in contemporary drawing, watercolour and conceptual abstraction, Hio Rain’s work offers a precise and recognisable visual field. His practice does not rely on spectacular effects. It works through tension, measure and restraint.

ShyFly: flight, distance and relative balance

The series ShyFly introduces another essential movement in Hio Rain’s work: flight.

But this is not a heroic flight. It is shy, intimate, protective. The artist describes the moment of detaching from the ground as something private, almost secret. Flying becomes a way to move away from fears, to see them from above, to recognise their scale.

In Shyfly 185, the image carries this idea with remarkable delicacy. The form appears light, almost hesitant. It does not dominate the paper. It inhabits it. The composition suggests that flight is not escape in the superficial sense. It is a change of point of view. It is the possibility of looking at fear from another distance.

The artist writes that the secret of flying is balance, and that balance may be relative. This thought connects ShyFly to the broader structure of his practice. Balance is not a universal formula. It is not fixed. It changes according to perception, fear, distance, weight and desire.

This is why Hio Rain’s work feels contemporary. It speaks to a condition many artists, viewers and collectors recognise today: the need to remain sensitive without collapsing, to stay in relation with instability without being consumed by it.

Why NNC Gallery selected Hio Rain

Hio Rain was selected by NNC Gallery through works that demonstrate coherence, research and a distinctive visual identity. His practice connects architectural thinking with emotional perception. It uses minimal means to explore complex states: balance, contradiction, vulnerability, discomfort, flight and inner structure.

For NNC Gallery, this kind of practice is especially relevant because it does not treat contemporary art as a matter of surface novelty. It works through continuity, reflection and a precise relationship between form and thought.

Hio Rain’s works also speak to a wider geography of contemporary art in Tuscany. Living and working in Orbetello, the artist contributes to a cultural landscape that extends beyond the dominant centres of the art system. His research reminds us that important contemporary practices can emerge from places of observation, silence and distance.

This is one of the reasons why NNC Gallery continues to follow artists over time. The Challenge is not only a selection mechanism. It is a curatorial process based on attention, quality, coherence and long-term observation.

Available works and curatorial advisory

The works presented here are the works through which NNC Gallery selected the artist.

Current availability and recent production can be verified directly through the artist’s official contacts. As art advisors, we are available to act as intermediaries and guarantors for potential acquisitions, helping collectors and interested buyers approach the purchase process in a safe, transparent and professionally supported way.

For more information about Hio Rain, the selected works, or acquisition enquiries, please contact NNC Gallery London.

NNC Gallery London

Contemporary art, curatorial research and international artist visibility.