Saturday, October 18 at 6 p.m., marks the opening of Apparitions Carlo Alberto Rastelli at Il Pomo da DaMo Gallery in Imola. On view are “constellated” portraits, veined wooden surfaces, and landscapes from another dimension. The artist, a finalist at both the Premio Combat and Premio Cairo, presents a body of work that expands perception, where abstraction and reality blur and shift.
The solo exhibition Apparitions—curated by Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei—questions the act of seeing itself. The real and the abstract touch, overlap, and sometimes deny one another, leaving behind a web of clues rather than a linear narrative.
Rastelli — finalist of both the Premio Combat and Premio Cairo — brings visual memory and the present into tension. His works draw upon photographic archives and historical imagery, renewed through a layered painterly practice: iridescent acrylics, stencils, and even masking tape are used to modulate surfaces, while fir wood panels reveal their natural veins like a seismograph of time.
In his group portraits, the human face is never stable; it dissolves into constellations, opening to metamorphoses that suggest a humanity in transit — restless within its temporal and spatial limits. Elsewhere, figures are obscured: galaxies and “black holes” veil their features and anatomies — as in the emblematic portrait of Andrea Costa, the Imola-born figure who traversed anarchism and socialism. Pastel hues merge with dark backgrounds and Romantic echoes: in the landscapes, one perceives traces of Böcklin and Turner, specters of an insistent memory.
The canvas series Pet Sematary — a declared homage to Stephen King — shifts the focus toward landscape. Latvian forests observed from life are populated by crosses and skulls, activated through dripping and chromatic bursts that suppress the human figure until it vanishes. The result is a perceptual slippage: a nearby elsewhere, almost within reach, where reference becomes uncertain and every image seems to arrive from an unaligned time.
“Reality and abstraction blend in a suspended narrative, resistant to any univocal reading,” explain curators Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei. “Faces and groups turn into constellations: humanity appears to yearn for transcendence, to overcome its limits,” they add.
Rather than illustrating reality, Apparitions destabilizes it: painting becomes a space of unstable translation, where images emerge as traces and sediments rather than as completed figures. An invitation to look longer — against the haste of the present.
Il Pomo da DaMo Contemporary Art
Imola
Date 18 ottobre 2025 – 8 febbraio 2026
