Contil: Bridging Painting with Recovered Digital Images

Photo courtesy of Nicky Conti

"Contil" is  the latest series of paintings that combine digital images, photography, language, and painting. 

10 years after the fire, I finally started to reopen the digital archive of what I had documented, and began experimenting by constructing digital composite of recovered images, like journal pages, and photographs, effacing and enhancing the images by painting on top of the printed material. Contil is a word used in Nicaraguan to describe soot. I saw a metaphor between that substance that remains after a fire and the way memory and digital files of lost works have been an unexplainable urge to look back. Perhaps I wasn't looking back, but the work had remained with me as Soot, needing to be resolved.

What began as an experiment has become a new path in my art practice, in which recovered imagery of subjects, places and periods in my life are reimagined,  reconstructed and revealed in a new context. The result is a series of intimate and emotional paintings, commenting on the challenges, and complexities of people in contemporary life, and I hope also evokes an intimate connection to our humanity.

On View at AOTA NYC East Village Creative Space. Contact the studio to schedule a visit.