Working in the shifting space between figuration and abstraction, Claudio Coltorti approaches painting as an encounter with what remains. His process unfolds through successive layers—applied, obscured, and often erased—allowing forms to surface only to be undone. As he describes, he rarely knows where the painting is heading; instead, he follows the traces that emerge in moments of removal, attending to the “beauty of the ruin” that persists after each gesture of erasure. These remnants become the true architecture of the work: fragile marks that testify to what once was, and to what refuses to disappear.

Within the frame of mourning and melancholia, Coltorti’s practice resonates as a meditation on residue, on the quiet force of what lingers beneath the visible. His paintings inhabit a dreamlike temporality in which images rise and dissolve, suspended between memory and oblivion.

Coltorti resists fixing meaning; for him, a painting continues to transform in the mind of the viewer, becoming metaphysically active even when materially still. This openness mirrors the textures of mourning, where loss is never fully resolved and meaning remains in flux. His surfaces, layered with pigments that fuse and seep into the canvas, suggest images emerging from an inner archive of forgotten memories. In this way, Coltorti’s work offers a contemplative space where absence takes form, where erasure becomes generative.