text by Mauro Zanchi

Pietro Catarinella puts something that comes from the art of debris back into operation. He takes up issues that have been investigated by Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg and beyond, reconsidering assemblages through recycled materials, presences sought in the scraps of everyday life. The project involves the reactivation of image-objects; apparently destined for an inevitable end, part of a current Merzbau in continuous evolution, where the imagomorphic flow relates to the gaze of the users and the space, to be reconsidered each time an element is added in setting up and resetting up. At the beginning, the dimensions of the work, its relationship with the space, the situation in which it will be found, where it will be placed are more interesting. All the rest is an opening to the possible in the chaotic form, to adhere to a process brought to maximum freedom. It is therefore a question of setting dynamic possibilities into motion. Other unremovable factors enter into this action, sometimes even sought out before anything else, such as chance, the indeterminate, postponement, and more that is left to the imagination or insight of the spectators. The mess that is formed in the superimposition of numerous images and words ensures that too much importance isn’t given to the single subject, theme, or meaning. If anything, the suspended mechanism would like to open up to polysemy. Is the elimination of the subject reassuring or not? Does the shifting of the gaze away from a single subject towards something more expansive, in such a way that the process of becoming and the continuous metamorphosis of the images can be connected, trigger another approach? Does everything that passes from the smartphone screen and the network have the same iconic status? Catarinella enters the flow of images that run through daily and he lets them cross by. He uses the current and the countless drifts that can be activated. In the continuous scrolling he draws something from speed, above all the overlapping of visual elements that inevitably mix with each other. The gesture is part of the flow: he chooses, approaches, discards, reconnects, acts, stalls, moves. Given the speed with which we measure ourselves every day, the artist watches the shaping of the agglomerations, and above all measures himself with the enigmatic presence that is hidden in the intertwining of images. At times he looks at them side by side: their meeting, like a haruspex that catches sight of what’s to come. Other times he waits for a response, as if he were in the presence of the Pythia in the temple of Apollo. Most of the time he thinks and reconsiders that mass of images, whose polluting intensity we do not even realize. He tries to reconstruct or recombine something in the manipulation itself, eliminating the linearity of time. It is an attempt to go beyond chronological and sequential time in order to bring other potentialities of the inexorable flow into the work: the intervention of Kairos, that is a propitious time to understand, with a clearer vision, what is happening here and now, to identify a moment of an indefinite period in which something special happens; the presence of Aion, eternal time that transcends the limits of a beginning and an end. In Catarinella’s gestatorial process the images are crossed with each other, they change continuously, they remain for months in the archives of memory. When they are then connected, juxtaposed, superimposed, put together, it is important that there is a suspended ambiguity in every point of the work, which allows the interpretation to be extended to polysemic openings. However, the sense of the joke and the ironic short circuit must also lurk in this presumed ambiguity. In the creation of the works, incomprehensible aspects are confirmed, prior to thought, which could generate different interpretations, levels, and relationships between things that must not be outlined. For the artist, the work, when rarefied, is graphic. If an intense density forms and encrusts, the viewer’s gaze almost no longer sees the juxtaposition of single subjects because the whole becomes a stain and appears as an almost abstract work or, in the most successful cases, as a psychedelic experience of perhaps primordial and elemental derivation. Every detail helps to set in motion the mechanisms of ambiguity and ironic deconstruction, so that the movement of the eyes can generate different readings. The structure of the whole also generates an acceleration that prevents focusing on the single element and giving it a single specific meaning. In this way, Catarinella works within the principle of speed, in its mystery, in order not to have the time, at the outset, to define the meaning that he wants to put into action. The approach to the image and connective tissue is lived nearly following the method of Robert Rauschenberg. And to stay out of control and inside of it at the same time, Catarinella often labors over several works at the same time, excluding the moment in which it is interpreted in a univocal way: something must remain open, in the tension towards an alterity that is not totally comprehensible. Speed ​​triggers displacements so as not to be too conscious and aware of what belongs instead to the unpredictability. It is precisely where it is not possible to understand how the work will proceed towards the end that the spirit of continuous metamorphosis comes alive and moves. It grows in the returns, in the repetitions of the images, in the random arrivals, in the continuous displacements compared to previous works. The process is absolutely open to the potential of chaos. In the agglomerations present on the transparent sheets, a further function is entrusted to the fragmented words or phrases: the relationship with the images remains on an indeterminate and fragmentary level, to prevent any relationship with verbal language from facilitating a single way of access, rather their presence serves to divert the interpretation of the whole into another stream. The different layers draw on the evocative power of medieval stained glass, so that the colors in the images, activated by the light, move something that connects and mixes the figuration with abstract or even psychedelic visions. Catarinella reads the backlighting of medieval windows as a reference that precedes the peculiarity of lightboxes, of PC and smartphone screens. The overwhelming flow of images at the time of broadband and ultra-broadband, of mobile phones that are always connected, of the hyperproduction of figurations has, however, also destabilized the potential of the visionary and weakened vision in the ecstatic experience. The choice to move the chaos of the images of our contemporaneity and the no longer fantastic flow of the monstrous, onto motionless and transparent surfaces connected in series - as if they were layers of a beyond suspended between space and time - creates a short circuit that seems to contradict every assumption linked to the conceptual construction of the work. And in this lies the sense of ambiguity, of profound irony, of the contradiction in terms, of the joke.