An afterimage is what the eye continues to perceive once the source has vanished: a spectral domain where presence and absence negotiate. Afterimage brings together the practices of Lorenzo Conforti and Leo Ragno, which converge on the same sense of instability through opposing material processes.
For Leo Ragno, painting is a deeply tactile discipline rooted in both classical tradition and his academic career as a Professor of Graphic Art at the Brera Academy. His method functions as an archaeology of the gaze: he builds rich strata of oil paint, then relentlessly scrapes and erodes them away so the canvas retains the memory of what has been veiled. The palette breathes with the warmth of the skin—delicate pinks and flesh tones colliding with cool, deep blues and greens under a soft light source. Through this reduction of contours, his figures dissolve from individual likenesses into universal archetypes.
In contrast, Lorenzo Conforti developed his artistic roots growing up between music and graffiti writing, later studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino. Operating from an inner psychic topography, his compositions combine oils and spray paint to create hybrid, abstract forms that oscillate between velvety, abyssal darkness and a pale, luminous haze. Pigments bleed and pool in a state of constant liquefaction—as if the canvas had frozen just seconds before drying—merging muted undertones into a foggy atmosphere. There is no exterior narrative here, but an internal landscape where identity fragments into a mist of instinct and memory.
Shown together, the two practices mirror one another. Ragno allows the figure to emerge through accumulation and erosion. Conforti allows the figure to surface only as an atmospheric trace. Neither artist paints an afterimage directly; that phantom appears on the viewer’s retina, held in memory a moment after the eye has moved on.
Lorenzo Conforti (b. 1996, Tolentino) lives and works between the Marche and Milan.
Leo Ragno (b. 1984, Milan) is a painter and Professor of Graphic Art at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, where he lives and works. He is represented by Federico Rui Arte Contemporanea, Milan.