BEFORE THE IMAGE Conversations on Painting in the Making
In a new series on ArtDependence Margherita Artoni examines what happens before a painting finds its form. Before an image takes shape, there is an intuition, a sensation, a memory, or an encounter with the world. There are questions without answers, ideas not yet fully understood, and possibilities that have not yet found their form. Painting begins in this uncertain territory, where looking becomes thinking and thinking gradually becomes a physical act.
At a time when images are produced, circulated, and consumed at unprecedented speed, painting offers a space in which ideas can remain open, change direction, and develop through the process of making. For artists whose practices are still evolving, the medium becomes a field of experimentation, where decisions are not always predetermined and a visual language emerges through the encounter between intention, material, and gesture.
BEFORE THE IMAGE: Conversations on Painting in the Making is a series of conversations with a younger generation of contemporary painters exploring the questions, experiences, and impulses shaping their practices.
Each conversation looks at painting from within the process itself: the ideas that initiate a work, the images and experiences that inform it, the role of uncertainty and intuition, and the challenges of developing a personal relationship with the medium. Beyond finished works and established positions, the series considers the ongoing process through which artists discover what painting can mean to them, how it can evolve, and where it might lead.
The artists invited to the series approach painting from distinct perspectives, working with different languages, references, and sensibilities. What connects them is not a shared aesthetic or a common direction, but an engagement with painting as an open-ended process—a practice in which questions remain as important as answers, and where the act of making can reveal possibilities that could not have been anticipated.
If AFTER THE IMAGE explores what painting can become beyond the image itself, BEFORE THE IMAGE turns towards the moment in which a painting begins to take shape: when a language is still unfolding, a direction remains uncertain, and something not yet fully visible starts to emerge.
Main Image: Margherita Artoni