The highly-acclaimed Italian artist exhibits for the first time outside of Europe at Gillman Barracks, Singapore.

Cristiano Pintaldi’s work will blow your mind.

For the uninitiated, it would seem that these paintings are merely trying to achieve an old television effect. But in fact, what you see is not really what you get. 

Up close, the paintings are made up of tiny dots of red, green and blue – the RGB colour combination of screen pixels.

A Pintaldi painting when viewed up close

But when viewed from afar, the pixels form a specific image. By so doing, Pintaldi encourages viewers to take a step back to view the bigger picture, literally.

It's a mind-boggling optical illusion that's hard to wrap your head around the first time. 

The same painting as the one above, but viewed from afar

To prove that Pintaldi's paintings are indeed made of only dots in primary colours, gallery director Valter Spano whipped out his phone and snapped a picture. "It's just pixels," he said, showing us his screen filled up with dots indistinguishable from one another except for their colours.

At an interview with Singapore Tatler at the Partners & Mucciaccia Gallery at Gillman Barracks, the Italian artist, who is 44, explained the message behind his work – a social commentary on the media and the blind trust that the masses place in it. 

Italian artist Cristiano Pintaldi who paints using only three primary colours: red, green and bue

“I use pixels because they are symbolic to represent this reality,” Pintaldi says. “There is more reason now than 10 years ago. Now everybody has a phone, a screen. If we ever invent an extension of our body, this is it.”

He is the only conceptual artist in the world to employ this unique technique of painting, which he discovered when he was 19. Pintaldi is now a master of the technique after applying it consistently for 25 years, and is now a renowned artist on the international art stage.

The process is just as fascinating as the final product. Pintaldi begins on a black canvas, and spray paints over it three times, in red, green and blue, over a giant mesh.

But it is not as simple as it sounds. Pintaldi has to memorise the elements of the painting, so as to achieve the right luminosity in the right places for an accurate lighting effect, and also to achieve colours like pink, yellow and gold. The result is a beautiful, vintage old television screen effect entirely done by hand. 

Mesh by mesh and layer by layer, it is a painstaking process that takes months, and sometimes even more than a year. 

“My work is incredibly difficult. For me, too,” Pintaldi admits. He never really knows what the final product will look like, until he removes the mesh. By then, he can only do minuscule touchups and little else.

He is influenced by images he sees in the news, Star Trek and Stanley Kubrick movies, and religious imagery like Buddha and Christ the Redeemer. Some of his works also feature Masonic imagery, representing the powers that some believe control the media.

His work also frequently feature golden orbs floating in the sky, representing the UFOs (unidentified flying objects) that he claims he has seen five times in his life.

All his works are untitled, so as to avoid influencing how people would perceive his paintings.

But regardless of which way people view them, his message is loud and clear – that you shouldn't believe everything you see. 

"Suspended Animations", curated by Gianluca Marziani, is on display at the Partners & Mucciaccia Gallery at Gillman Barracks from now until 7 December 2014.


More tatler_tatler_stories: