PHYSIS GLITCH – Reclaiming the Ineffable

Federica Viola

The images that Roberto Davolio presents in this exhibition are infused with colors that intertwine, pulsing like a heart immersed in a deep abyss, like a breath exposed to the vast immensity. Color manifests as a dense liquid floating on the surface or as a gaseous entity, evoking deep emotions and recalling the Asian philosophy of qi, the flow of energy that
connects all things.

In his works, the sensitive approach to color aims to engage all the senses, intertwining them in multiple ways, inciting powerful emotional responses. The meeting of hues catapults the observer into that region of vision where we are forced to squint and intensely search to reconnect all our visual and, above all, intuitive faculties. It is at that moment that we are most vulnerable, and intuition pierces the patterns of intellect, leading us to a deeper understanding. It is in that moment that the artist’s shot reveals itself in its most lyrical notes, offering us the opportunity to recompose fragments of a broken existence
and allowing our perception of time to float in indeterminacy.

The artist extracts geometry (circles, triangles, squares…) from the urban and natural context that surrounds him and reaffirms its symbolic power and ancient sacredness.

The images appear to vibrate and resonate with the observer. They generate an “elsewhere” constructed through light and different chromatic planes, which, while revealing the artist’s original affection for architecture, presents itself in its essential balance, opening us to new possibilities.

Influenced also by the paintings of Rothko, Davolio creates images that sometimes seem to expand, pushing outward, while at other times they seem to contract, collapsing into themselves. His shots depict the suspension in the void of a vital force, frozen in the moment before it becomes action. Vitality and emptiness, two inseparable aspects of existence, mirror each other, showing themselves as two sides of the same coin, revealing the ineffable.

These images also display a debt to Eastern artistic traditions, as they emphasize contemplation, emptiness, and harmony between forms.

Certainly, all of the artist’s creations connect with our innermost emotional and spiritual sphere, revealing both its power and vulnerability. They open our senses to intuition, an intuition that can surpass the limits of rationality and lead us to a deeper understanding.

But there is more. In the era of the digital revolution, where images are no longer merely visual representations but codified and manipulable languages through artificial intelligence, it becomes very difficult to continue associating them with our idea of reality. Roberto Davolio’s artistic research, therefore, focuses on this theme, questioning how it is possible to counteract the dispersal of the human perspective in an age where machines redefine perception through complex algorithms, how to use technology without being overwhelmed by it, and the potential of advanced technologies to reveal hidden dimensions of reality.

The camera, in fact, often without our knowledge, tends to reshape perception starting from basic pre-programmed algorithms within it, until it produces results entirely foreign to the physiology of the human eye, with all the advantages and dangers that may arise. Davolio does not reject this process, but chooses to confront it, using it in a critical and conscious way.

To do so, with an innovative vision that combines advanced technology and artistic sensitivity, Davolio has developed, and continues to refine, an external electronic device that reshapes perception. From the very beginning, he has rejected any manipulation after capturing the image, choosing instead to intervene directly in the process of visual construction through a confrontation with technology itself. As in the art of calligraphy or ink painting, where the essence is expressed in the act of creation itself, the gesture must be immediate and conscious.

Not by chance, he names this tool Hermes, like the Greek messenger god, master of metamorphosis and guide between different worlds. It creates a new environment in which the pre-programmed algorithms can no longer refer to preset variables. Removed from their usual context and forced to confront variables beyond their control, they are destabilized and enter into crisis, initiating the configuration of unforeseen possibilities.

Hermes is programmed with the help of artificial intelligence, but Davolio subordinates it, preventing it from crossing the boundaries he has assigned. The confrontation with it is immediate. Hermes is able to directly affect the visual landscape of the camera by projecting, between the lens and the photographed subject, different colors and archetypal geometric shapes, called “primitives”. These are representative of the imaginal reality that thus enters into dialogue with the surrounding reality.

In the moment the shutter closes, the automatic processing of the image must therefore come to terms with the unforeseen and meaningful structures introduced by the artist through Hermes, pushing the viewer toward a unique and radically new perceptual experience, free from (cultural, emotional, or algorithmic) conditioning, and able to introduce them to the complexity and multiplicity of the “real”.

By accepting as reality what the eye sees, we usually tend to forget that vision is not merely a static act of contemplation, but a dynamic perception influenced by memory, expectations, and context. Davolio thus seeks to highlight how reality is not what the eye sees, but what the eye has not yet seen and can only validate, since, in fact, we can only see what has already happened, while the future comes to us from an unknown place. The “pictorial” nature of the digital image and the current technological tools of interaction with it can therefore help us, starting from this consideration, to expand our perception and define the structure of new possible realities, showing how what we have always considered the boundary between the real and the imaginary to be is in actuality a permeable membrane.

Davolio has designed Hermes through the creation of various prototypes until he reached near immediacy in action and thus the greatest expressive spontaneity.

Each creation of the artist is unique and safeguarded, confirming the importance he places on authorial choice to counteract the process of mimicry to which the authors are subjected in the contemporary age. Indeed, authenticity now risks being suffocated by processes of imitation and serialization, while, according to the artist, each of us is called to make our unique and unrepeatable contribution to weaving the web of relationships, causes, and consequences orchestrated by nature.

In a single motionless shot, therefore, lies the ultimate synthesis of a response. While the certainty that photography serves as a means to trace reality is taken away, each of us is offered the possibility of describing reality in its entirety—one that unfolds through a process of perceptual expansion, akin to meditative contemplation, challenging consciousness to investigate beyond itself, into that unconscious where our intuition soars. Davolio thus proposes a form of photography that does not document reality but reinvents it, fostering an expanded and conscious perception.