Pietro Catarinella is a painter. Or perhaps not.
His diverse, multimedia practice engages with a contemporary interpretation of the ancient tradition of painting, suspended between the sacred and the profane — a dualism that once animated the canvases of artists like Hieronymus Bosch, with his unsettling Garden of Earthly Delights, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who transformed the divine into decorative splendour.

With a background in architecture and an MA in Contemporary Photography from Central Saint Martins in London (2014), Catarinella investigates the shifting dynamics of reality and visual representation in the digital age — marked by the influence of the Internet, social media, and emerging technologies.

He therefore explores this boundary through a novel lens: Artificial Intelligence, a creative “Big Brother” that, far from controlling thought, becomes an unexpected artistic partner. His Post-Human Hallucination fuses the primordial gesturality of oil painting with cold algorithmic logic, in a cyclical process that generates unexpected visions, almost like digital “psycho-paintings”.

By feeding the AI with his own past works, the artist triggers a software machine learning that evokes a ‘synthetic unconscious’, a kind of algorithmic ‘dream factory’ with evolving knowledge. This unprecedented collaboration explores a ‘new ecology of visions’, where the artificial nature of the painting becomes a territory of almost mystical investigation, a ‘bottomless abyss’ from which unprecedented and disturbing forms and meanings emerge that nevertheless belong to us.

As in Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony, in which the sacred is constantly undermined by the profane, so in Catarinella's work the purity of artistic intention is confronted with the unexpected drifts generated by the machine.

Far from falling into an Orwellian ‘groupthink’, the artist guides this unprecedented collaboration towards a redefinition of the boundaries between the human and the machine, between the transcendence of the sacred and the concreteness of the profane, in an artistic dimension that pulses with a new, disquieting contemporary sacredness and makes us spectators of these modern altarpieces that feed on hieratic and mysterious figures. They appear familiar through their archetypal and referential nature, yet emerge in radically new forms, shaped by an aesthetic logic we are only beginning to understand.

Claudio Composti