Partners & Mucciaccia is pleased to announce SPY the new UK solo exhibition of Cristiano Pintaldi. Facebook, UFOs, and lightning striking the Eiffel Tower are just a few subjects that Cristiano Pintaldi’s large scale paintings reveal in this new exhibition, entitled SPY.

Pintaldi’s artistic research focuses on questioning reality, and SPY is no exception. Pintaldi only seeks to shine a light on what we might have missed and, in turn, challenges our worldview, our preconceptions, what we take for granted as being obvious and true.

Pintaldi’s paintings fully embody the vulnerability and loss of control that social media, newspapers and tv seem to impose, undetected, on contemporary society.

Cristiano Pintaldi’s pictorial research is based on the reconstruction of visual space obtained through a procedure similar to that of video imaging. His paintings are in fact paintings according to the scrambling logic that is typical of electronic images, where the elementary units of information displayed on the screen is the pixel, with the three colour dots of red, green and blue. Depending on how far or close one stands to Pintaldi’s paintings, it will determine what reality one sees.

His innovative approach is reminiscent of George Seurat’s “Neo- Impressionism”. Seurat’s paintings possess ‘parallel realities’ – viewed from a certain distance a familiar scene appears luminous, slightly dreamy yet lifelike on the canvas but when viewed close-up, it reveals countless brush strokes of unmixed paint. Pintaldi’s paintings hold the same principle. But whereas Seurat seemed to overlook the implications this aesthetic could have on how we relate to the world in general, Pintaldi does not.

For Pintaldi, artistic technique is not just a means to an end, and optical illusions are not merely novel ways to entertain. How we approach artwork, in its making and viewing, reflects fundamental truths about ourselves and the world at large. Pintaldi puts up a mirror to both.