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.