On 28 October at 6.30 pm, Galleria Studio Cenacchi, Via Santo Stefano 63, opens FICTIONALISM, an exhibition of photographs by Diego Macrì, curated by Guido Piacentini, with an introductory text by Vittorio Riguzzi.

Images lie at the heart of the project. They occupy the increasingly fragile boundary between truth and artifice — two ideas that are becoming ever harder to separate within the deceptive, varied and profoundly hybrid visual world of contemporary life.

We encounter images in many forms: as art, as advertising, or somewhere between the two. Commercial communication borrows from art and transforms its imagery; in turn, those images find their way back into the visual language of institutional art.

In Macrì’s photographs, context is deliberately pushed aside. The image is not tied to a particular place and is given little surrounding information. It stands on its own, claiming a meaning that does not depend on what lies around it.

Today, the same image can exist simultaneously in countless physical and virtual spaces. It may begin its journey as part of a carefully planned marketing strategy, only to be absorbed into distribution channels governed by a far less predictable logic. We might encounter it in an underground station, on a website or in the street; on YouTube or Facebook; in a book, a museum or an art gallery.

Macrì’s photographs become part of the very serial and disorientating flow of images they seek to examine. The artist describes the work as emerging from his fascination with the icons that pursue us through everyday life, but also from a desire to explore the ambiguities of visual experience.

Where does the beauty of the subject end and the photographer’s ability begin? Where is the boundary between an artistic image and a commercial one? And what happens when the artificial elements surrounding something real become more powerful than the reality they were meant to frame?

The ‘double images’ push this uncertainty further. Two symmetrical versions are presented without revealing which is ‘real’ and which is ‘fake’. The semi-portraits pose a different question: how much visual information can be removed from a face before the alteration becomes apparent and identity disappears?

Macrì also reverses the process. Information is duplicated and layered over the original until the image is irreversibly distorted, becoming a disguised imitation of itself. These are the works he calls his ‘photographic images’.