“Through his art practice he is investigating the changing nature of reality and visual representation in the digital age, exploring the new qualities and limitations of the digital image in its networked environments.”
(Christopher Vanja – Gallery and Project Manager at Art Basel, Switzerland)
Pietro Catarinella (Rome, 1983) lives and works in Milan. An architect by training, he completed a Master’s degree in fine art photography at Central Saint Martins in London in 2014. It is at this time that he defines his artistic practice: a research with a digital genesis that questions the changes of reality and visual representation in the era of the Internet, social networks, new media and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Ongoing series of works:
Post-Human Hallucination
a new body of works is created using artificial intelligence (AI). Images are printed on cotton canvas and oil painted. As with the rest of the practice, it is based on a tension between personal intuition and the involvement of technology as an external extension of a collective mind. The process is cyclical, with machine learning being performed repeatedly. For each image generation, the AI is fed photos of my completed works, which have been previously generated by the machine and painted. This process allows the AI to study my own works and reformulate them based on its experience. By increasing the textual input and shortening the time given for data processing, I address the AI in a way that challenges its generative logic, aiming to bring out its synthetic unconscious. The objective of this body of work is to expand the boundaries of painting by fully integrating the mechanical mind and organic body. This will be achieved by investigating the resulting subconscious visions in a shamanic manner.
Imagomorphosis
an ever-changing personal archive of the Internet based upon a continuous manipulation of images. These are intersected, mixed and fused together through the use of software, digital technologies and manual intervention. The denial of the single image brings to assemblages in which the elements are no longer separable but rather become part of multi-layered networks. This process visualizes synthetically the complexity of the digital age, its fragmentation and acceleration, the accumulation and ubiquity of images.
Instant Mimesis
a series of works each consisting of two overlapping digital prints: a self-portrait of a painter from the past (or rather a photographic reproduction of him found on the Internet) with a selfie taken while looking at it. In these images, two distinct realities are compressed onto a single plane: the outside and the inside, the observed object, the subject and the space around it.
Before the invention of photography, only painters could portray themselves. Today, anyone can easily and instantly reproduce their image using a smartphone. However, the medium's ease of use, its speed and mechanical nature shift this practice away from self-reflection and toward an instantaneous, everyday, superficial form of staging. All the power, the Aura, as Walter Benjamin would say, that the pictorial portrait possessed has been lost in the consumerist extemporaneity of the selfie. These digital images signal a presence and, at the same time, an absence of intensity; a careful gaze and a construction of one's image over time are missing in them. The works overlap two different approaches to the gaze, two different worlds. The first, one in which artists were beginning to self-represent themselves, and the other in which everyone, in a sense, is an artist but at the same time no one really is.
Anamorphic Images and Melted Pictures
in these series the author brings together digital technologies and traditional painting techniques, blending them to such an extent that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. The starting images are digitally deformed, printed, applied to different supports and manipulated through painting. At the end of the process, the initial pictures are almost completely unrecognizable leaving space to fractal eco-systems made of quasi-images.
Short Bio
Between 2015 and 2018, his work has been exhibited in London (East London Photography Festival, Green Arcola Gallery and Ashurst Ermerging Artist Gallery), China (Pingyao International Photography Festival), Lithuania (AV17 Gallery), Rome (Mattatoio / Macro Future, Temple Gallery), and Madrid (Nadie, Nunca, Nada, No). In 2018, he is a finalist in the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize. During Vir Viafarini-in-residence, his artistic practice evolves into an investigation of the relationship between digital and physical space, and he is invited by Bruno Barsanti to The Others Art Fair (Turin) to set up his first immersive installation.
In 2019 he creates several site-specific installations including ‘COVER-UP’ and ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ both at Macro, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome and ‘Google’s Decalogue’ (Spazio Gamma, Milan). His work wins the 2019 Ora Prize, is finalist at the ‘Lumen Prize’ in London (2017 and 2019), and the Premio Francesco Fabbri (2019 and 2022). In May 2020, he is part of Studio Visit - 30 artists for 30 days, a virtual exhibition conceived by Fondazione Pini, later published in a volume by Studio Boite Edition. In October of the same year, he founds Armenia Studio, a shared studio project involving 7 artists and a Project Room including a broad program of events ranging from performance (i.e. Phoebe Zeitgeist - Persefone la ferita), participation and events outside the studio (SWAB Barcellona), to art residencies. From March to June 2021, he takes part in two bi-personal exhibitions, the first in Prometeo Gallery by Ida Pisani, accompanied by a critical text written by Mauro Zanchi, the second in the Concordia II space (Milan), a collaboration between the same PROMETEOGALLERY and Vir Viafarini-in-residence. In the same year he is part of Image Streams at Baco, Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna in Bergamo. In October 2022 participated in the exhibition Interferences, organized by NP-Artlab in Padua where he presented for the first time his series of hybrid digital/oil paintings called Anamorphosis. In early 2024 participates in the exhibition Extension of Selves, organized and curated by the London-based Lumen Prize at the Wuhan Art Museum (Qintai), China. He is currently among the finalists of the NTAa ‘25 - New Technological Art Award, organized by Foundation Liedts-Meesen. The finalists show “Intelligence, it’s automatic: from surrealism to AI.” curated by Thierry Dufrêne will be held at Zebrastraat - Ghent (Belgium) at the beginning of 2025.
His work has been acquired by different private foundations and public collections and such as Wuhan Art Museum Qintai (China), Palazzo Monti (Brescia), Vir-viafarini (Milano), Baco - Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna (Bergamo), Casa Testori (Milan).