Nicola Bertolo

Shows
2026
“Nuove Paure”, final show of a group residency, New Fears Gallery, Berlin
“The Chatroom and the Dollhouse”, group exhibition, SomoS Arts, Berlin
“Stay Human! Utopias and Dystopias in the Digital Age”, finalist for the first edition of the Berlendis Prize, curated by Marigana Gallery, Venice

2025
“Avantabar”, group exhibition, curated by Leonardo Totino & Avantgarden Gallery, Jamaica Bar, Milan

2023
“Reverberating Things”, group exhibition, curated by Andrea Lacarpia, Candy Snake Gallery, Milan
“Venice Time Case”, itinerant group exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento, March

2022
“Intemporale”, group exhibition, curated by Iva Lulashi & Prometeo Gallery, text by Carlo Sala, Prometeo Gallery, Milan
“Venice Time Case”, itinerant group exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, NP-ArtLab, Padua
“Venice Time Case”, itinerant group exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Galerie Italienne, Paris
“Am I a joke to you?”, two-person exhibition with Andrea Luzi, curated by Caterina Fondelli, Spazio Murka, Florence

2021
“Venice Time Case”, itinerant group exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Galleria Tommaso Calabro, Milan

Gleb: Your works often contain a sense of anxiety, but it doesn't threaten me so much because it is softened by nostalgia and familiar imagery. Do you think this reflects a new reality, where we construct ourselves through multiple narratives, identities, and digital experiences?

Nicola: Rather than a new reality, I see it as a hybrid era, a space where physical and artificial lives have merged so much that they have become impossible to separate. Growing up, my headspace was shaped by a rich mix of completely different things, from graffiti and alternative music to manga, suburban houses and sci-fi movies. I’ve always naturally processed the world by colliding disconnected elements, and today digital flows operate in the exact same way, because platforms and algorithms create a continuous, blended dialogue where com- pletely unrelated worlds coexist. In my practice, I try to map this overlap. Sometimes I pack contrasting ae- sthetics into a single space, and other times I isolate, distort, and break down a single subject until its original form is completely disrupted. This process ends up creating an altered, destabilized form of vision, where we are constantly recycling old, familiar imagery just to make sense of a weird, hybrid present.

Gleb: Your works can also be read as intimate spaces filled with personal memories and emotional attachments. Do you feel this tension between distance, irony and intimacy in your practice?

Nicola: I don’t feel this tension, because the way we consume content today has deeply reshaped our psychological landscape, blurring the distance between opposite emotional tones. When every kind of stimulus is presented with the exact same weight, different emotional values begin to lose their distinction. This means that irony and intimacy no longer contradict each other, but rather live side by side in the very same experience. In re- cent years, I have focused precisely on cyberpunk anime frames from the eighties and nineties because their narrative content explored a specific kind of existential weight and the hybrid relationship between human life and technology, perfectly anticipating the psychological condition we experience today through our te- chnological extensions. My own moods serve merely as a starting point for this process, because the ultimate goal is to map the collective identity of a post-digital generation rather than just focusing on my own.

Gleb: Where do you see the border between digital life and reality today? I know this is a philosophical question, but I wonder whether you could share a personal experience that helped you understand, negotiate, or balance the relationship between the two.

Nicola: I don’t have one specific, defining anecdote, but it’s more of an ongoing awareness that hits me whenever I force myself to disconnect. I only feel a clear boundary when I experience a total disconnection from scre- ens during a vacation, because forcing myself into exclusive contact with the natural world is the only thing that temporarily removes that permanent, hybrid filter over my eyes. This detachment has helped me realize how deeply our relationship with time has shifted, as I noticed that my memories of past personal events are being heavily influenced and overwritten by the massive amount of screen-based visual inputs I scroll throu- gh every day. It is not that human memory was ever completely objective, but the sheer volume of images we consume today actively reshapes our past and our cognitive perception, creating a strange sense of displace- ment where what I actually lived and what I saw on a screen begin to merge. This condition is unsettling yet deeply fascinating, and it is precisely what drives my practice. Through painting, drawing, or collage, I am never seeking a safe, nostalgic escape; instead, my goal is to map the modern folklore emerging from this per- manent interplay.