Enrico Bertelli — À propos — Slash Paris

Enrico Bertelli is a painter of mystery. A painter in the broad sense, above and beyond the narrow definition. Using everything that comes to hand — found trash, discarded photographs, his own discards — he triggers the unexpected with compositions jumbling supports and media. Failure contributes to his works, which spring from it readily. Those same works preserve all the marks of the making process, offering the viewer what usually remains impenetrable, while exploring the twists and turns of the visible and probing the ultimate depths of reality. This ambitious approach is complemented by paradoxically revealing gambits drawing as much on photography as on painting: masking, erasing, enlarging, cutting-up, concealing. A pictorial chemistry within which anything can happen. Components come together and come apart in his assemblages and even, on a larger scale, in groups oscillating between the part and the whole — a back-and-forth that points up Bertelli’s interest in astrophysics, an endless rearrangement that from one exhibition to another either destabilises perception or generates fresh interpretations. An inflexible gaze has to be stimulated, which explains his frequent interplays of transparency and opacity, as well as a resistance to the eye and to interpretation that has a political edge in — once more — its emphasis on the marginal and residual. Devoid of any form of self-evidence, his art tends to defy description, to bring together these items — even banal — of existence that touch him but lie beyond understanding.

— Antoine Camenen for L’ahah, 2019
(translation by John Tittensor)