Cristiano Pintaldi
Landscape
22 November – 18 January 2003
Sprovieri is pleased to present the first solo show in the UK of new works by Cristiano Pintaldi.
Pintaldi’s subjects are always taken from television. He paints with a laborious procedure, which both emulates and contrasts the technological nature of television sequences. Only three colours (red, blue and green) fill the elliptical perimeter of each “picture pixel”.
He began to deploy this technique systematically in 1991, when his tri-colour view assailed characters from Japanese cartoons: monsters, extraterrestrials and androids. The alien became the recurrent, metamorphic subject of his paintings. Sometimes it looked like a UFO, sometimes a robot, sometimes characters from famous science fiction films. In Landscapeits presence is depicted in seven new paintings representing crop circles.
The alien is paradoxically noted, seen, perceived. Always imagined, placed in a figure, represented figuratively. Almost an effect of our coexistence with the world of television: the alien is among us, and is communicating with us. It is the otherness that is familiar to us, we are accustomed to seeing, that is always before our very eyes. It embodies the distance and at the same time, the intimacy of a world in which fiction and reality seem to merge. Pintaldi dwells on this ambiguity and succeeds in making it more complex.