Davide Maria Coltro. L'opera completa 2000-2023

"Making technological art might seem obvious, but in truth it's an act of courage because you encounter formal and theoretical issues that are still unknown", says Davide Maria Coltro. Further: "As far as I'm concerned, a monitor is a living canvas on which I can paint, which can emit light and even turn time into a pictorial element".
Coltro, to whom this monograph is dedicated, is the father of the System, a digital system that infinitely modifies the work into a continuous visual flow. Hence, the nature of the "canvas" changes, becoming mobile and unpredictable, like life itself. However, the relationship between the work and the author also changes, with the latter being able to intervene on that living canvas and reinvent it even after it has made it into a museum or into the home of a collector (albeit within the limits of a contract agreed in advance between the parties).
Savinio said of Longanesi that his works always had something new to say: "Basically, whoever buys a painting by Longanesi buys ten". That said, whoever buys an electronic painting by Coltro also buys ten, or rather a thousand, or rather an endless number. After all, if everything moves, as Heraclitus knew, the work need not necessarily remain the same, but can experience a potentially unlimited metamorphosis. However, there's a distinctive trait in the movement of Coltro's digital painting. There's no doubt that in his works, by paying heed to the solicitations of a large section of modern art, from the futurists to the kinetics, the artist represented what is to come, the changing essence of things. Yet, his is a slow movement, at times imperceptible, which goes hand in hand with the motionless time of contemplation. It is more similar to the motion of consciousness than to that of machines. Meanwhile, the catalogue of forms and the chronicle of the things he represents becomes lighter, unburdened, allowing a space interwoven with luminosity to emerge.
Elena Pontiggia