OLTREOMBRA

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we are what we watch

This series was born to observe how the advent of the digital has changed the logics by which we perceive the world, and therefore how we represent it. By creating his own digital world, man has shaped new idols and a new collective memory; yet digital reality no longer obeys the physical laws of the earth. This vision has begun to absorb and cannibalize the real world, to the point of manipulating its very course.

The portrait of contemporary man that results is no longer the snapshot of an instant, but a collage of images and information: a global digital identity that puts us on display, yet only for what we choose to share, bound to a medium that can distort its attributes and its meaning.

Relying on this source alone as the intermediary of perception and communication has made us lose our traits of intimacy and personality, in favour of a plasticity and an artificiality that alienate the human being to the point of erasing his deepest nature.

Reflecting on these themes led the artist to ask how he might paint a contemporary portrait that could define the image of an era without necessarily seeking to explain it.

Ritratti d’ignoti (Portraits of the Unknown) sets in dialogue the bodies and faces of deliberately unknown people; to this end they are stripped of any feature that would tie them to specific individuals or contexts. The aim is to render the human being symbolically rather than representationally, leaving the viewer a space in which to recognize and seek a figure familiar to them.

The images — born from the overlay of sharp marks and even fields of colour — are built on a geometric grid based on the Fibonacci curve. With them nothing is celebrated but the human being and his emotional states, stirring emotion through the rhythm of the curves and the chromatic tones.

The depictions are deliberately simple; yet the main image is not the representation of a single meaning, but holds symbolic-geometric messages constructed within the figure, which stands for both the face and the body of the subject. For this reason the value of the work lies in the viewer who knows how to read it.

The images can therefore be described as an artificial realism that filters and alters reality, making clear both the human figure and the artificiality that composes the image; the paintings let a real human identity coexist with an almost metaphysical context and subject.

2019/2020

2017/2018