Pietro Catarinella: “A Post-Human Hallucination between Sacred-Prof_AI_no”
Pietro Catarinella is a painter. Or maybe not. His heterogeneous and multimedia art delves into a contemporary reading of the age-old art of painting, in tension between the sacred and the profane, a dualism that has inflamed the canvases of masters such as Hieronymus Bosch, with his disturbing “Gardens of Earthly Delights” and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, capable of sublimating the divine in decorative splendor. An architect by training, with a Master’s in contemporary photography from Central Saint Martins in London in 2014, he is an artist who questions the changes in reality and visual representation in the era of the Internet, social networks and new media. He therefore explores this boundary through a new lens: Artificial Intelligence, a creative “Big Brother” that, far from controlling thought, becomes an unexpected artistic partner. His “Post-Human Hallucination” fuses the primordial gestures of oil painting with cold algorithmic logic, in a cyclical process that generates unexpected visions, almost digital “psycho-paintings”. By feeding the AI โโwith his own previous works, the artist triggers an automatic learning of the software that evokes a “synthetic unconscious”, a sort 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 new and disturbing forms and meanings emerge that nevertheless belong to us. As in Bosch’s “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”, in which the sacred is constantly threatened by the profane, so in Catarinella’s work the purity of the artistic intention is confronted with the unexpected drifts generated by the machine. Far from falling into an Orwellian “groupthink”, the artist leads 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 pulsates with a new, disturbing contemporary sacredness and makes us spectators of these modern altarpieces that feed on hieratic and mysterious figures, but with a strong archetypal and citational value and therefore already familiar, despite the total innovation of the forms.
Claudio Composti
