Ivan Pili returned to painting after a quarter of a century dedicated to music. The turning point came in 2014, almost by chance, during a concert in Germany. Since then, in just a decade, he has made a name for himself on the international contemporary art scene, exhibiting in prestigious institutional venues, such as Palazzo Zenobio in Venice, Palazzo Sant’Agostino in Salerno and the Royal Palace of Caserta, as well as major international fairs, including Art Basel Miami, Artexpo New York, Carrousel du Louvre, Frieze Los Angeles and Art Dubai. His work falls within the hyperrealist figurative genre, but the Sardinian artist rejects the idea that his painting is an aseptic imitation of reality. In his paintings, predominantly portraits and female figures, technical precision serves to capture what he himself calls “that which often escapes”: time sedimented in the skin, the truth of a gaze, suspended breath. The Caravaggio-esque light that shines through his canvases creates atmospheres where silence becomes language and everyday gestures acquire monumentality. His recent works, from the “Impressions” series to paintings like “Mollycoddle” or “Behind Friendly Lines”, demonstrate an evolution toward the essential. After facing health problems that transformed his creative approach, Pili works by subtraction, completing a work not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. To delve deeper into his poetics, we had the pleasure of asking him a few questions.
Ivan Pili
Andrea Guerrer: You interrupted an international music career to return to painting after a twenty-five-year hiatus. Has this long absence changed the way you see and paint? What have you brought with you from music to your painting practice?
Ivan Pili: When I stopped painting, in the late 1980s, I truly thought that phase was over, like so many teenage passions. Music had taken over everything: constant study, competitions, travel, stages. Then, in 2014, with the stroke, that world was suddenly interrupted. It wasn’t easy, but the need to express myself didn’t fade: it simply changed direction. Returning to painting after twenty-five years wasn’t a “return”, but a rebirth. I no longer paint as I did as a boy: time, my body and my gaze have changed. What the illness took away in speed and brilliance, it gave back to me in the capacity to remain in silence, to observe without haste, to accept a slowness that I now consider a value. From music I take three elements that have also become fundamental in painting: first of all, rhythm and pause, because in music it’s not just the notes that speak, but also the silences, and the same is true in painting: what I don’t paint weighs as much as what I define. Then, the work in layers, because in the accordion every phrasing arises from micro-choices, just as in my paintings happens with the glazes: an image must “sound” over time. Finally, discipline, because years of study have taught me patience, perseverance and method, and in the studio I paint with the same mindset: inspiration is built through daily presence. My long distance from painting, paradoxically, has made me more of a painter. It forced me to truly choose this medium, not as a hobby or a fallback, but as a necessary act. Today I don’t paint to make a “beautiful picture”: I paint to give meaning to the space that music has left free.
Ivan Pili, “Dawn from the Shadow”, 2024, oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm, courtesy of the artist
Today, hyperrealism coexists with an era dominated by digital imaging and generative artificial intelligence. What is the significance of choosing this laborious and time-consuming technique in the current context? Is it a form of resistance or something else?
We live inundated with images that appear and disappear in an instant. Artificial intelligence today can create a face or an entire scene before we’ve even finished conceiving it. In this context, spending days or weeks on a single image might seem an anachronistic, almost stubborn, choice. But for me, it’s not resistance in the romantic sense: it’s simply my way of staying within an image, with the time it requires. Hyperrealism, today, is above all an exercise in slowness. There’s no point in trying to compete with a machine: it produces, I take the time to look, choose, change my mind. And precisely these limits, which AI doesn’t have, are a fundamental part of the result. But it’s not even a true return to the past: it’s more similar to what happened when photography arrived. At first, many painters felt threatened, but then photography became a precious tool, almost an ally. Perhaps the same will happen with AI. This is why I don’t see hyperrealism as a nostalgic act, but as a way of restoring density, responsibility and time to an image in an era that tends to make them all interchangeable. Painting doesn’t compete with speed: it takes its own pace. And perhaps that’s precisely where it retains its power.
Ivan Pili, “She, the power, the life”, 2015, oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm, courtesy of the artist
Photography can instantly capture what you spend weeks or months painting. What, in your opinion, is the main difference between a photographic portrait and a painted portrait? What can painting do that photography can’t?
Photography and painting don’t compete; they touch each other. Photography has the power to capture a moment with a clarity and immediacy that painting cannot and should not imitate. Behind a photographic portrait, there’s more than just “a click”: there’s a gaze, a choice of light, a precise way of positioning oneself in the face of passing time. Painting, on the other hand, traverses time differently. It doesn’t record a moment: it reconstructs it, reassembles it, rethinks it. A painting is born from a series of slow decisions: what to show, what to remove, where to let the image breathe, which part to let slip into the shadows. It’s a process that inevitably includes my doubts, my hesitations, my insistences. This is why I say that painting translates rather than copies. Not because it’s superior, but because it’s another language. Photography captures a presence in time; painting attempts to convey that time in a single surface. Sometimes I simplify a backdrop, other times I amplify a fold of light that in reality was insignificant. I don’t do it artificially: it happens because my way of looking enters the painting, settles and changes what I see. Then there’s the physical dimension of the work. A canvas isn’t just an image: it’s a body. It absorbs the light of the room, changes slightly throughout the day, ages over the years, and carries with it the material history of its layers. It’s a unique original, with its fragilities and silences.
Ivan Pili, “Like a Catharsis”, 2021, oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm, oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist
The female figure often recurs in your paintings, depicted with a particular focus on intimacy and vulnerability. How do you choose the subjects and moments to depict? Is there a specific theme that you feel is closest to your research?
I often choose the female figure because, in my view, it possesses a very broad range of emotional nuances, capable of expressing that more silent and introspective side of the human being that is at the heart of my research. It’s not an ideological or aesthetic choice. It’s simpler: in female gestures, I find a naturalness in showing vulnerability without declaring it, a way of inhabiting the body that allows micro-tensions, hesitations and small weaknesses that often go unnoticed to surface. It’s precisely those details, almost infinitely subtle, that I’m interested in painting. The male figure sometimes has a more assertive, more protected, more constructed posture. In the female body, however, I perceive more immediately that intermediate zone between strength and fragility, between control and abandon. And this ambivalence is precisely the material I seek in my work. There’s also a personal aspect: looking at a female body puts me in a state of deeper listening, less competitive, less analytical. It allows me to observe without overwriting, to remain suspended. In short, I don’t paint female figures because “they are women”, but because in that way of being in the world, in small gestures and non-protagonist postures, I find the emotional languages I desire.
Ivan Pili, “The Countdown”, 2024, oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm, courtesy of the artist
You’ve said that a work is complete “when there’s nothing left to remove”. This subtractive approach seems almost opposite to the additive nature of painting. How do you recognize that moment in practice? And what does this principle mean in the phases of working on a canvas?
This phrase didn’t originate with me, but over the years it has been attributed to me because it describes my working method very well. Painting is born by adding material, yes, but the final image takes shape when I begin to remove: removing elements, removing distractions, removing unnecessary virtuosity. It’s a process of cleaning, almost of excavation. A sort of sculpture in reverse: instead of removing physical material, I eliminate visual information. This subtraction is evident on many levels. In composition, for example, I prepare sketches full of objects, details and complete environments, then I begin to remove everything that isn’t necessary to the tension of the figure: a window becomes a shadow, an entire room is reduced to a neutral tone, not because it’s unimportant but because it distracts from what I want to bring to life. Even in detail, the subtraction is evident: hyperrealism would push you to describe everything, whereas I choose what not to describe. I soften a fold, blur a texture, make a point that would otherwise be overly defined opaque. This selection allows the figure to breathe and, paradoxically, makes reality more real when it’s not entirely declared. The moment I understand that a work is complete comes when removing more would mean emptying the painting, while adding would merely be decoration. It’s a physical sensation: the painting stops asking me to explain. I’m starting to feel a clear, essential, and necessary presence. This approach probably also stems from my personal history: after I stopped playing music, I had to remove a lot from my life. And I discovered that, sometimes, it’s precisely through subtraction that you get to the essence more quickly. This is true in life, and it’s true in painting.
Info:
Actor and performer, he loves visual arts in all their manifestations.
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