Artist Statement — Furio Torracchi

Photography, for me, is never finished. A photograph taken in the world — a figure at the water's edge, a person in their room, a landscape glimpsed through glass — is not a document but a starting point: material to be returned to, questioned, and transformed.

My practice moves across photography, painting, sculpture, and digital media, but the photographic image remains at the centre of everything. Through digital manipulation, painterly intervention, and formal fragmentation, I strip images of their descriptive function — what remains is closer to emotional residue than information. Figures dissolve into colour and movement. Domestic scenes become half-familiar, half-abstract. Landscapes resist topography in favour of feeling.

Memory is the conceptual thread connecting these bodies of work. We do not remember in photographs — we remember in impressions: a quality of light, a texture, a warmth or weight that resists precise description. My series What Remains of Our Memories makes this literally visible: large-scale wall installations in which personal memories are rendered as abstract colour fields, their specific content dissolved, their emotional temperature preserved. Private Sphere approaches the same question from a different angle — the intimate geometry of domestic life, treated not as portraiture but as affective structure, images that become everyone's memories and no one's.

The beach and seascape photography that forms the largest body of my work operates through a similar logic. Figures running into the water, standing at the shoreline, immersed in light — reduced through digital manipulation to near-abstract gestures of colour and movement. These are not holiday photographs. They are images concerned with the boundary between presence and disappearance, between a person and the elements that surround them.

My painted and mixed-media work — the series Between Graphic Realism & Pop Art — tests the same questions against a different register: the imagery of contemporary culture, social gestures, everyday motifs, subjected to the same process of transformation. Here the starting material is not landscape or the private interior but the shared visual world we all inhabit — and the question is what remains when its surfaces are reworked, its familiarity disturbed.

I do not think of my practice as belonging to a fixed style or medium. It is a continuing inquiry — into what an image can hold, what it loses when manipulated, and what, surprisingly, it gains.

Furio Torracchi, Munich, 2026