Afterimage
An afterimage is what the eye continues to see after its source has disappeared: a trace that lingers on the retina, caught between presence and absence. Afterimage takes this liminal state as its starting point, bringing together two Milanese artists whose work arrives at the same instability from opposite directions.
Leo Ragno depicts the figure surviving within a turbulent contemporary world while staying rooted in classical tradition. His method recalls an excavation: paint built up in layers, then scraped away, so the surface retains the memory of choices no longer visible. His palette holds the warmth of skin: soft pinks and flesh tones against cool blues and greens, as if lit by a single gentle source. Simplified far enough, his figures lose their contours and become something closer to a general, almost universal presence. Lorenzo Conforti starts from the opposite end, blending different forms into hybrid, largely abstract compositions whose ambiguity is deliberate, a way of resisting the pressure to explain everything at once. His surfaces move between dense, velvety darkness and pale haze, paint bleeding and pooling as if still wet.
Shown together, the two practices mirror each other. Ragno disappears by adding — layering presence until the figure gives way to something larger than itself, meanwhile Conforti disappears by withholding, letting only a trace of the body surface from the start. Neither artist paints an afterimage directly, but both build the conditions for one to appear: a figure held in memory a moment after the eye has moved on, or just before it arrives.