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If painting still respects a logic that legitimizes its practice and existence in our hyper-saturated civilization of the image, it is its ability to break the representation, to open a crack on the slippery LCD surface behind which reality takes shape and action, a crack that even if it was imperceptible, has permanent and incisive effects, destined as it is to open more and more. And it’s just around the idea of the crack that Giorgio Petracci—painter, designer, craftsman of abstraction—has developed for years his research; cracks, his own, that open up onto words so much material as they are imaginary.

The crack as a wound on the flesh, the crack in the atmosphere around the earth globe, the crack on the screen of a smartphone, the crack on the outer wall of a building beyond which one cannot see the interior though but that it envelops the spectator into another space-time dimension. Painting as a system of vision thus becomes a tool for measuring the relationship between the human body, the cosmos and the psyche, where the bloody wound is the equivalent of a galactic explosion but only to the point where the brain can read it as such. After that, there is only the vacuum.

Having so naively entrusted representation to the digital technologies and being no longer able to portray it freehand, it is as if reality itself retraces back the various liquid-crystalline phases and decomposes in front of our eyes, a sort of big bang backwards: from an HD image that could be enlarged pushing the index up and the thumb down, to the primordial origin of the universe when space was crossed by invisible gravitational waves, just like those that seem to push Petracci’s matter out of the canvas, investing the spectator and slowly transforming the surrounding reality into a vacuum.

 

Francesco Spampinato (art and visual culture historian)