I have been photographing for as long as I have been painting, and I have never resolved the tension between the two. It is not a conflict, it is a permanent conversation, a back and forth between two ways of being in the world. The camera and the brush do not ask the same thing. They do not pose the same questions. And above all, they do not accept the same answers.

When I photograph, I search. I hunt for a moment, an accident of light, a fleeting alignment between a body and a wall, between a shadow and a pavement. Photography is an art of patience and reflex at once, you have to be there, at the right moment, with the right framing, and press. The gesture is minuscule. A finger. A click. And everything is decided. What the sensor records already existed before me. I simply had the discernment, or the luck, to see it.

When I paint, I do not search. I create. The black I lay on the canvas did not exist before my gesture. The white space I let breathe between two strokes is not a void found in the world, it is a void I decided, as explored in the irreversible gesture.. Painting captures nothing. It invents. And that is where the two practices part ways, in a gap that looks like an abyss but may, in truth, be a bridge.

What the lens refuses

There are things photography cannot grasp. Not due to technical limitation, today’s sensors see better than the human eye, across spectra we cannot even perceive. No, what eludes the lens is everything that does not yet exist. An emotion before it takes shape on a face. A premonition. The weight of silence in a room. The peculiar density of the air when someone has just left.

Photography records the visible. Even when it transforms, distorts, overexposes or underexposes, it always starts from what is there. That is its greatness and its limit. Eugène Atget photographed the streets of Paris in the early morning, when they were still empty, and those images carry something spectral, but the spectre was already in the street, as explored in Matisse and freedom.. Atget did not invent it. He recognised it.

Painting can start from nothing. From an impulse. From anger. From an inner rhythm that has no equivalent in the visible world. When I load my brush with black acrylic and trace a gesture across the canvas, I am not reproducing something I have seen. I am bringing into existence something that had no form before this movement of the wrist. It is dizzying. And it is irreversible, acrylic dries fast, India ink cannot be reworked, the gesture is laid down once and for all. No Ctrl+Z. No second take.

Richter, or the blurring of boundaries

Gerhard Richter spent his life making the boundary between the two tremble. His photorealist paintings of the 1960s reproduced photographs with staggering precision, then he blurred them, a slight softness, a loss of focus that transformed the image into a memory. Richter painted photographs to show that painting could do what photography could not: introduce doubt. A sharp photograph asserts something. A blurred photograph painted in oil asks a question.

Later, Richter moved into pure abstraction, those immense squeegee swipes where the tool traverses the canvas in a single motion. There, no photograph was possible anymore. What Richter produced existed in no external referent. It was pure matter, raw colour organised by the controlled chance of a physical gesture. He had passed through photography to arrive on the other side, in a territory only painting could explore.

I often think of Richter when I am in my studio, because my own path follows a parallel but inverse trajectory. I started from photography, from capturing the real, the Roman light on ochre facades, faces seized in the street, and I arrived at abstraction. At radical black and white. At the irreversible gesture laid on the virgin canvas. As though photography had taught me everything the visible could offer, and painting had taken over to go where the lens could not follow.

Same palette, different worlds

Black and white in photography and black and white in painting have nothing in common. Nothing. The resemblance is deceptive, it is like saying the sea and the sky are both blue. Technically, yes. Sensorially, absolutely not.

In photography, black and white is a subtraction. You remove colour to reveal structure. Contrasts become architectural. Shadows gain volume. Silver grain adds an organic texture that digital tries to reproduce without ever quite succeeding. Photographing in black and white means simplifying the real to extract the essential. It is a gesture of clarification.

In painting, black and white is a construction. You remove nothing, you lay down. The black of acrylic on white canvas is a presence. Not the absence of colour, but the assertion of a material. India ink on paper has a density, a sheen, a depth that black and white photography does not know. And the white is not a void, it is the canvas itself, the support that breathes, resists, enters into dialogue with the black imposed upon it.

When I move between the two within the same day, which happens often, the camera in the morning, the brush in the afternoon, I feel as though I am changing language. Not simply medium. Language. The grammar is different. The syntax is different. What I can say in photography, I cannot say in painting, and vice versa. And it is this impossibility of translating one into the other that drives me to practise both. Not to reconcile them, to measure the distance between them.

Abstraction as forbidden territory

There is a precise moment when photography concedes defeat. It is the moment of pure abstraction. One can photograph an abstract painting, of course. But one cannot photograph abstraction itself. One cannot point a lens at the world and bring back an image that resembles nothing known. Abstract photography exists, close-ups of surfaces, plays of light, intentional blur, but it remains indexed to the real. It starts from an object, however unrecognisable. It distorts; it does not invent.

Abstract painting invents. It creates forms that have no referent. A black stroke crossing a canvas of sixty by ninety centimetres, laid in a single gesture, with the exact thickness the arm decided at that precise instant, that stroke is the reproduction of nothing. It is itself. Entirely. Absolutely. And that is what makes it so difficult to photograph: not technically, but ontologically. The photographic reproduction of an abstract painting always misses something. The material. The relief. The vibration of the support. The way light plays across the thickness of the paint depending on the angle from which one looks.

That is why exhibitions matter. That is why nothing replaces the face-to-face encounter with the canvas. The screen flattens. The lens frames. Only the body standing before the work receives the entirety of what the artist has deposited.

The invisible bridge

I have never wanted to choose between painting and photographing. It would be like choosing between inhaling and exhaling. Both gestures are necessary. Photography keeps me in the world, it forces me to look, to go out, to walk the streets of Rome or Lyon with my eyes open. Painting brings me back inside, it forces me to close my eyes, to listen to what rises from the body, to lay on the canvas what the external world does not show.

Between the two, there is a space I cannot name. A territory without medium, without tool, without technique. A place where the image is neither captured nor created, but simply sensed. Perhaps that is where art truly resides, in that interstice before the gesture, when one does not yet know whether to reach for the camera or the brush, and the whole world hangs in that hesitation.