The intense interaction between “physical” and “digital” realities that characterizes our time has led to the birth of the neologism – PHYGITAL – crasi indeed of these two terms.

The continuous exchange between online and offline experiences has naturally involved also the art world, especially the new generations of artists for whom the digital world is an integral part of their daily lives. Exposed to a constant use of digital images, they have assimilated and made their own a new aesthetic – that of photomontages, animations, avatars and virtual worlds up to the climax of the metaverse. This new type of images, generated or altered by technology, have become the basis of a new aesthetic language.

The exhibition wants to show how we can interpret this concept with a bidirectional approach, creating a very interesting hybrid result.

If indeed the works of Katie Hector and Alic Brock refer to a digital aesthetic but are realized with the use of a fine airbrush technique, Gioele Amaro is instead by definition a digital painter – he digitally realizes his works by altering pre existing images with technological devices and applications, and gives them a physical reality by printing the jpeg file on canvas.

The portraits of Katie Hector are an attempt to create an archive of images of friends or people she knows, born as a personal necessity of the artist during the recent period of forced isolation. These portraits, however, do not have the typical character of representative realism, but instead they appear like impersonal subjects seen through a thermo scanner or avatars of a virtual world by fluorescent colors. This result is achieved thanks to the particular technique developed by Katie: a mixture of bleach and dye for fabrics applied with the airbrush on canvas. Exploring the potential of the canvas as a fabric, the artist works with overlapping layers that literally ‘dye’ it.

Alic Brock’s work is based instead on a repertoire of non-personal images, but on the contrary: icons of sport or pop culture of recent American history. Those icons themselves became a commercial product and marketing image. The work on display takes up the aesthetics of photomontage – exasperating the collage effect – and represents the iconic Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. It amazes the realization in acrylic on canvas, and the final effect of hybrid product.

Conceptually, ‘hybrid’ is the perfect definition of the work of Gioele Amaro. As a digital painter he decides to confront himself with one of the most classic themes of Renaissance peinture: the trompe d’oeil. Working digitally with shades and shadows, he seeks as a result the optical effect of curved or reflective surfaces.

Digital and Physical will not be two independent worlds much longer. The transiction has begun, we are curios to see where we will land.