Pietro Catarinella

Lives and works in Milan, Metropolitan City of Milan, Italy

Artist statement

The Aftergaze – On the Persistence of Images is a body of oil paintings on raw linen built from film stills, found and personal photographs, self-portraits, reproductions of historical paintings and, occasionally, AI-generated images. I came to painting after working for years with photography and digital image-making. In the darkroom, I was drawn to the suspended moment in which an image slowly emerged in the developing tray. Once fixed, printed and made fully visible, however, I often felt that something had been lost. Painting has allowed me to return to that interval between appearance and disappearance, extending it through a slower and more physical process. Rather than searching for yet another image, I am interested in giving existing ones another life. Sources separated by period, medium and origin are brought into the same pictorial space, where their original contexts become unstable. Old Master compositions, cinema, personal memory, photographic archives and digitally generated imagery pass through the same material filter. Through layering, transparency, abrasion and areas of exposed linen, they merge, fade and settle into new configurations. In a visual culture shaped by accelerated circulation and continuous exposure, painting introduces a different duration. It slows the encounter with an image, allowing perception and memory to remain active rather than immediately resolving what is seen. I do not understand this slowness as a rejection of contemporary...

Artwork