This direct observation has become a methodological starting point: Pretolani develops a painting practice that engages with disappearance, with a figuration that is partial, elusive, immersed in an apparent state of abandonment—almost archaeological. Yet his work departs from nostalgia or restorationism: it does not evocate an idealized past, nor does it present historically recognizable icons, but moves in a realm where time becomes an active agent, a pictorial stratum in its own right, capable of deforming, transfiguring, and abstracting original forms.
For Pretolani, painting begins with the choice of material, and even in the earliest interventions: layers, impastos, textures, formal decisions of significant pictorial weight are set in motion. He avoids industrial supports, favoring materials such as wooden panels, cotton, linen, and jute canvas, manually prepared with volcanic stone‑powder (pumice), a technique derived from eighteenth‑century mural tradition, intended to produce surfaces that are light, absorbent, porous. The matter breathes, reveals traces, accepts gesture, generates unexpected chance. Color fields are never uniform: each canvas is constructed through overlaps, veils, erasures, and stratifications that render the surface unstable, alive, sensitive. In this context, the image often appears as a byproduct of the material; a secondary apparition, never defined in advance. As the artist himself indicates, his primary interest at the outset is to produce matter, not image, and when the image does arise, it does so as a phenomenal consequence of the painting’s physical conditions.

Thus, his work cannot be described as figurative in the traditional sense, but rather as material abstraction, in which even recognizable elements such as a flower, an animal, a fossil skull, a technological object lose symbolic strength and become transient presences, fragments of an ongoing process.

One of the central conceptual dimensions of his practice is without doubt time.
Not only understood as the duration of pictorial execution, but as an aesthetic condition, a variable capable of determining appearance, understanding, and survival of the image. The paintings are spaces traversed by time, and what manifests on the painted surface is the result of an unstable equilibrium between what remains and what vanishes. Images do not submit themselves to immediate reading; layered, partial, sometimes erased, they demand prolonged observation, patience, a willingness to confront indeterminacy. As in hypnagogic phenomena or peripheral vision, the apparition occurs only under suspended, slow, non‑assertive observation.

The works on show do not aspire to formal originality, but to a state of uncertain origin. The images belong to no fixed era, neither past nor future: they seem drawn from a time without time. These images could have always existed, or perhaps never existed at all. Thus, they are not “original,” but “originary”: derived from primal forms, archetypal or fossil elements, retaining a character that is potential, unfinished, fluctuating. Figures emerge like fragments of frescoes torn from forgotten walls: camellias, fish floating belly‑up, raptor talons, drones that resemble crabs, candelabrum‑like antennae…
Not icons, but shapes oscillating between mythology and entomology, religion and zoology, relic and invention. The subjects appear like X-rays, blurred effigies, or fossilized presences of a vanished world. These images may be termed spectral, not in the gothic or literary sense, but in optical and phenomenological terms. The spectrum is what no longer is, yet continues to appear. The figures drift in this threshold, suspended between a past that can no longer speak and a future not yet realized. In this liminal zone, doubt is essential: not knowing with certainty what one sees is integral to the aesthetic experience. There is a tragic sweetness in all of this: a dissolution that does not erase, but conceals.

The exhibition’s path concludes with “The Restless,” a figure that synthesizes many tensions of the entire cycle: an angel, or better, a celestial chimera, headless, with six limbs, floating in an apocalyptic sky. It is the only subject clearly -fantastic-, and at once the most real: a body that appears beyond death, beyond time, beyond form.

The title “Spegnigiorno” alludes to a transition between light and shadow, but also to a time that fades without fulfilling itself, like a frozen twilight. It is a compound word, lacking fixed meaning, that coheres with a painting practice in which dissolution assumes greater significance than emergence, and where clarity yields to a nuanced, uncertain understanding, as though every image emerges from opaque matter suffused with soft, diffused light that dissolves contrasts and holds the gaze in a zone of ambiguity.

As at Pompeii or on the island of Thera, where ashes did not destroy but preserved, suspending time in a fragile eternity, so in this cycle the light does not reveal but seeps, and the forms emerge only partially, like relics resurfaced from an interrupted world.

Like an Etruscan fresco or a Byzantine icon corroded by time, each work becomes a fragment of a silent cosmology where the human is but echo, a shadow observing from afar. If painting remains possible, it is because it can speak with a spectral voice, with funereal grace, with the delicacy of a powdered veil that protects what time has not yet dissolved.