I have always believed that shadow is the necessary contrast that makes light shine — not only in art, but in every dimension of existence. One must not fear the shadow to enjoy the light. Everything I create grows from this conviction.
I began photographing at twenty-one. For three decades the camera was my brush — I would have preferred to paint, and photography taught me instead to look. It still does: it remains the root of everything that follows, the discipline that decides what is worth looking at before any tool is chosen.
I explore the cracks in reality. We are accustomed to a controlled, reassuring world — but ugliness, diversity, disorder, the impossible all wait behind every door. When that door opens, we discover that the combination of the ordinary and the abyss is not so terrible after all. On the contrary: it is precisely there that the philosophical tension arises which makes us live and think with greater depth.
In the work, that crack is not a metaphor. It is a device. Two orders of the real are forced into a single image and the seam between them is left visible, never resolved.
Most often the crack is evidential. The work begins from a photograph: sometimes one of mine, sometimes a document that existed before me and without me — a found image, an archive, something that carries a real absence. What matters is that something was actually there, before a lens, in a place and at a time. Generative tools then extend that document beyond its own borders, and the crack divides what was from what never was. This is the method I call AImagine: an act of intention before technique, where what matters is the concept that precedes the image.
Sometimes there is no document, and the crack is constructed rather than inherited. The tension is built entirely within the image. These works demand more of the concept, not less, precisely because no fragment of the real is there to carry it.
AI is the tool, not the author. Each series explores new territory without renouncing what came before — only in the whole will the message I am reaching for become clear.
Giuseppe Satriani was born in Italy and lives and works in Bilbao, in the Basque Country — a landscape that has shaped his photographic eye for over two decades. He signs his AI-based research as Umbra Mentis.
contact@umbramentis.com
the shadow of the mind from which every visible light is born
ABOUT
ABOUT
the shadow of the mind from which every visible light is born
I have always believed that shadow is the necessary contrast that makes light shine — not only in art, but in every dimension of existence. One must not fear the shadow to enjoy the light. Everything I create grows from this conviction.
I began photographing at twenty-one. For three decades the camera was my brush — I would have preferred to paint, and photography taught me instead to look. It still does: it remains the root of everything that follows, the discipline that decides what is worth looking at before any tool is chosen.
I explore the cracks in reality. We are accustomed to a controlled, reassuring world — but ugliness, diversity, disorder, the impossible all wait behind every door. When that door opens, we discover that the combination of the ordinary and the abyss is not so terrible after all. On the contrary: it is precisely there that the philosophical tension arises which makes us live and think with greater depth.
In the work, that crack is not a metaphor. It is a device. Two orders of the real are forced into a single image and the seam between them is left visible, never resolved.
Most often the crack is evidential. The work begins from a photograph: sometimes one of mine, sometimes a document that existed before me and without me — a found image, an archive, something that carries a real absence. What matters is that something was actually there, before a lens, in a place and at a time. Generative tools then extend that document beyond its own borders, and the crack divides what was from what never was. This is the method I call AImagine: an act of intention before technique, where what matters is the concept that precedes the image.
Sometimes there is no document, and the crack is constructed rather than inherited. The tension is built entirely within the image. These works demand more of the concept, not less, precisely because no fragment of the real is there to carry it.
AI is the tool, not the author. Each series explores new territory without renouncing what came before — only in the whole will the message I am reaching for become clear.
Giuseppe Satriani was born in Italy and lives and works in Bilbao, in the Basque Country — a landscape that has shaped his photographic eye for over two decades. He signs his AI-based research as Umbra Mentis.
contact@umbramentis.com