There is no painting without catastrophe

Today I came across a headline in the arts section of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that caught my attention deeply: “There is no painting without catastrophe.”

The phrase refers to a central idea of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his work Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Beyond bringing back pleasant memories of my first experience reading Deleuze, I was surprised to find in this newspaper —which I had usually regarded as a mere news reproducer— a cultural approach of such philosophical depth. That surprise prompted me to revisit these ideas.

When I first read the book, I was less involved in managing digital photographic images and felt closer to painting in its conventional sense. But today, rereading that passage, I decided to take a fresh look, as it seems to me that it can illustrate not only the pictorial experience but also a broader condition: that of contemporary visual creation.

Thus, I allow myself to translate it to my current situation as a digital photographer-artist: “There is no image without catastrophe.” A formulation that resonates with the tension, disruption, and transformation inherent in creative work in the digital era.

The phrase by Gilles Deleuze —“there is no painting without catastrophe”— serves here as a key to rethink the photographic act and its digital evolution. Photography, in its conventional practice, has often become a complacent repetition: recording “what we like,” that which confirms what we already know how to see. That shot, reduced to a descriptive gesture, turns the image into a monotonous document, a risk-free confirmation.

This project seeks to fracture that logic. Catastrophe, in the Deleuzian sense, is not mere disaster but a condition of possibility for creation. It implies interrupting order, breaking the cliché, opening space for the unexpected. In this case, catastrophe begins in the observation prior to the photographic shot: it is no longer about capturing what is pleasant, but about detecting tension, emptiness, the possibility of the unprecedented hidden in the gaze. The mental image that arises in that instant is already a first catastrophe: the break of the habitual, the opening toward an outside.

The second stage occurs in digital creation. The initial photograph, once processed in the algorithmic or Photoshop space, presents itself again saturated with easy solutions and algorithmic repetitions. There, again, the artistic gesture consists of introducing catastrophe: cuts, twists, overlays, and accidents that ruin the surface and allow the digital Figure to emerge — that which neither represents nor adorns, but makes one feel, unsettles, and transforms.

This double movement —catastrophe in photographic observation and catastrophe in digital manipulation— constitutes the core of the project. It is about shifting the image from mere repetition toward creation, from taste toward risk, from complacent capture toward living experience.

In times when both the camera and the algorithm tend to produce the recognizable and consumable, the Deleuzian lesson becomes even more urgent: there is no image without catastrophe. Only by passing through that fracture can digital photography escape descriptive monotony to become an aesthetic event, a space of life and intellectual enjoyment.

Beneath the Surface: Ricardo Báez Duarte’s Subaquatic Metaphysics

Ricardo Báez Duarte’s recent body of work defies the conventional boundaries between painting and photography, constructing a visual language that is at once lyrical and unsettling. Through the fusion of submerged figures with echoes of European cityscapes—Venetian canals, Roman arches, shadowed Gothic façades—his images stage a quiet, persistent question: what lies beneath appearances?

These “painterly-photographs” (as one might call them) are not simply aesthetic juxtapositions; they are philosophical meditations disguised as visual compositions. The watery realm in which his subjects drift or dissolve serves not only as a metaphor for the unconscious but also as a challenge to the clarity we expect from photographic truth. Is what we see a memory? A dream? A residue of someone else’s gaze?

Behind the symbols—flooded plazas, baroque reflections, translucent faces—lurks a more fundamental inquiry: what is existence when detached from linear time and stable identity? These works do not answer such questions. Rather, they suspend them in fluid ambiguity, offering viewers the experience of disorientation as a path toward deeper perception.

Báez Duarte’s art resists the noise of spectacle. It whispers instead. In these submerged urban moments, we are invited to see not just what is pictured, but what remains—unspoken, half-seen, almost lost—behind the veil of image and symbol.

Fragments of Silence

Beneath a sky of liquid shadows,

the veins of light unfold,

they move, they breathe,

like an ancient map of the unseen.

To the left, the water dances,

breaking into deep blues,

serpentines of cold lines,

a memory that never rests.

But to the right,

the fire writes its story,

burning in red, in rust, in quiet voice,

like a scream trapped within the earth.

Between both worlds—

a wound of glass,

a fragment that connects the intangible,

where time folds,

and the tangible becomes a dream.

I gaze, I cross,

I fall and I rise,

I am water,

I am fire,

I am the moment

where everything touches

and nothing remains.