THE AFTERGAZE
On the Persistence of Images
I wasn’t looking for another image. I was looking for another destiny for images.
In the darkroom, everything seemed wonderful to me. There, images were more alive.
Perhaps that’s why, every time I printed a photograph, I felt a profound sense of disappointment: the feeling that something was always missing. Through painting, I began to search for what photography could not offer: the absence of visibility, the liquid epiphany of images slowly emerging from the developing tray, the suspended time between the shot and the first sight of the negative. A time capable of nourishing the imagination and a dynamic memory, in continuous transformation. Through painting, the initial images lose their origin. They resurface with new appearances. It is precisely then that they begin to live.
It is an act of hospitality
I realized very early on that painting could allow visual elements that had never met to merge with one another. Film stills, self-portraits, found photographs, reproductions of old paintings, and, at times, images generated by artificial intelligence coexist in a natural and plausible way. The hand continues a process begun by memories, photographs, encounters, archives, and algorithms. Each fragment gives up its own autonomy to become an inseparable part of a more complex image.
It is opacity
During the process of accumulation, areas emerge within the painting that resist interpretation: opaque zones. Rather than asking to be understood, they simply ask to be crossed through. They are spaces where images still in formation, uncertain spatial relationships, and open meanings can coexist. Here the painting interrupts its own informational chain and expands the reading time into a duration of indeterminate length.
It is a politics of the gaze
Today images flow past our eyes at such speed that they barely have time to settle into memory. Painting moves in the opposite direction. It slows down. It interrupts the flow. It asks the gaze to pause long enough for an image to keep transforming. This suspension is not just a matter of time, but of relationship. The moment an image no longer has to inform, persuade, or be immediately recognizable, it can establish an emotional, open, non-functional relationship with the viewer. In this space, faculties that the information society tends to suppress are reactivated: contemplation, free association, involuntary memory, imagination, and the capacity to dwell in uncertainty. For me, painting also means defending this possibility of relationship with images.
It is flow
What seemed still moves again. Images emerge before I even manage to recognize them. While I paint, I often have the sensation that an image — or a shape, or even a color — is already present on the canvas, and that my task is not to invent it, but to reveal it, slowly bringing it back into the light. In the end, through a circular movement, the painting reveals a subtle relationship — now inscribed on its surface — between the original images and the intuition that first made their encounter possible.
It is an act of care
In The Aftergaze, everything is biographical and personal but, at the same time, phantasmagoric and impersonal. Everything originates from ordinary observation and the gathering of fragments of reality, often tied to my personal experience. But the moment they enter the painting, they stop belonging to me. Their continuous overlapping generates an unstable visual matter: occasional configurations from which each painting slowly takes shape. The work is finished when I finally feel I have taken care of that chaos.
Pietro Catarinella