Analog Photoshop
February 7 – March 2, 2025
Pietro Landi
Curated by JJ Manford
Opening reception February 7, 2025 from 6-8pm
Press Release
Underdonk is pleased to present Pietro Landi: "Analog Photoshop", a selection of recent prints made between 2020 and 2024. Landi's works draw your eyes in with saturated hues, and complex juxtapositions. As you move in, you will uncover a range of seemingly disparate content, from a fashion model “cyborg” to two and three-dimensional images such as a plastic noose from the classic board game Clue, a cowboy, a beach, a nineteenth-century Ukrainian peasant, images often mixed with hints of indoor and outdoor landscapes (that ultimately become dreamscapes). Landi cites artists John Baldessari, Shepard Fairey, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein as major inspirations, and it’s fascinating to catch hints of these influences in his unique and original work.
Pietro Landi’s way of working recalls the film "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and its aleatory structure of loose parameters and an embrace of chance discoveries. In Landi's words, “I start with accepting that I don’t know what I don’t know. The joy comes from not knowing what will happen. I find stillness and quiet in the calm safety that something will occur. The joy comes from learning from the outcome. The joy comes through the process of shedding fear, anxiety, depression, and grief."
Trained as an architect and photographer, Pietro Landi began his “analog photoshop” approach after being isolated in a Truman Show-like bubble during the global pandemic, repeatedly walking the same neighborhood path with his child in a stroller. Developed in tandem with “an addiction to daily affirmations (also known as Instagram,) Landi started a daily meditative practice of quieting his mind to allow a purely intuitive, subconscious-led process to occur. He began with the innocuous act of flipping through and selecting pages from his wife’s fashion magazines.
Early into this new way of working, Landi noticed an immediate parallel between the new social-media-driven AI-face-transformation software and the old-fashioned “analog” Photoshop approach. Aware of the level of cutting, stretching, smoothing, and pimple erasing a "person" undergoes in Photoshop to be presentable in a spread fashion, Landi illustrates that "these beings represented on these pages are as much technology as they are human." He realized he could hint at this concept by adding “lines” to the human form to make them appear robotic. The analog cutting of the magazine page with an X-ACTO knife is also a 1:1 metaphor depicting how digital images are manipulated with a mouse. The results are his Cyborg series.
After spending two years focused on processing the increasingly traumatic outside world [his 2021 show was titled “This is America”] Landi focused inward. "As a new parent, eager to make myself the broken link in the generational chain, I gave myself the mission to face my fears. Speak the unspoken. I decided to connect with my inner child's fear, feel the teenager's anger, and accept the overwhelm associated with this new title Papa, to process my share of generational trauma head-on. As a highly visual person, I understand the world through objects and have always been fascinated by the level of story, cultural identity, and emotion a small object can carry."
Swapping from portrait mode to cinematic mode, Landi started working with a basic conceptual framework following the question: "What would happen if I pressed pause and captured a still image many times during an HBO show (investigating our cultural obsession with sex and violence) and then combined all those different still images containing various actors, scenarios, and props into one composition?"
Most recently, Landi has begun to physically manipulate his printed-on-metal compositions, creating one-of-a-kind sculptural artworks that push the boundaries between printmaking, photography, graphic design, advertising, and sculptural assemblages even further.
Landi’s new works range from sparse to dense, with multiple reference points that work together to tell a layered story. Each viewer is challenged to become a detective, connecting dots, imagining character relationships, and finding clues and details to tell a larger story to themselves.
Pietro Landi (b. 1982) is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist who enjoys ignoring the lines drawn between photography, sculpture, painting, and printmaking. His work has been shown at The Johnson Museum at Cornell University, The International Contemporary Furniture Fair, Pratt Institute, Model Citizens, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Room 68 Design Gallery, and Tappeto Volante Gallery. The New York Times has critiqued his work, and it has been shadow-banned on Instagram.
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