Cristiano Pintaldi. Incontri ravvicinati

From 1 February 2023 21Gallery presents the work of Cristiano Pintaldi, one of the most interesting and successful Italian painters of the generation that emerged in the 1990s, in an exhibition curated by the art historian Costantino D'Orazio entitled "Incontri ravvicinati" (Close Encounters).

Since his inception, the artist has fascinated the public for his extraordinary technique, thanks to which he is able to reproduce any image and color, using only shades of red, green and blue, arranged in millions of pixels on the canvas. Reproducing by hand the technology that allows images to appear on a television screen, Pintaldi creates unique and inimitable paintings that have been around the world and have been exhibited in museums such as the MAXXI - which has one of his works in its permanent collection - the MACRO or the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. His works have been acquired in the collections of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art of Rivoli (Turin), of the MART, in the VAF – Stiftung collection (Trento), of the CAMeC Modern and Contemporary Art Center of La Spezia and have been exhibited on international stages from Singapore to London, up to one of the collateral events of the Venice Biennale.

Pintaldi's world was born and moves around television and the images that films, series or international news have transformed into icons. Long before the explosion of social networks and the phenomenon of fake news, the artist began to explore the process that makes a piece of news or a story a piece of collective memory, even if very few have been able to observe it from the truth. In particular, the phenomenon of UFO sightings has always fascinated the artist, to the point of becoming a recurring motif in his work. In his paintings well-known faces from past films appear, but also frames taken from global series such as Paper House or Squid Game, where each time the viewer finds himself in direct dialogue, involved in the scene, which appears only if he looks at the painting a certain distance. Surprising is the experience in which the combination of red, green and blue pixels produces a black and white image.

What differentiates my work from that of other artists - says Pintaldi - is the modus operandi: the color chosen, the final color that the observer perceives in the painting is invisible to me during the process. It is the result of a combination of three colors spread on the canvas at different times, placed next to each other and never mixed; the "brush" is guided only by my instinct.

The nature of our perceptions, the subtle, ineffable boundary between reality and dream, the relationship between soul and nature, truth and illusion, intuition and design: these are themes that have already questioned Greek philosophers and have sparked debates for millennia. For this reason, we can say that Pintaldi's work constitutes a stage within the universal philosophical journey, a point of view that is not afraid to take a position in the centuries-old investigation that seeks to assign human beings a place in the world. (Costantino D'Orazio, from the text in the catalogue).... read the rest of the article»