What In The World Does A Pixel Artist Do?

What in the world does a pixel artist do? A master of the craft, Cristiano Pintaldi, sheds some light (and colours) on it.

- Allisa Noraini

IF YOU EVER find yourself marvelling over a work of Cristiano Pintaldi close up in an art gallery, chances are, you’d be asked by a curator to take a few steps back. Not because you have landed yourself in trouble. What seems like hundreds of red, green and blue dots randomly strung together in a modular pattern suddenly appears to be a patch of white, at a distance. The top corners of the painting dissipate into a dark hue of green as you inch further backwards. Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you; these mind-boggling, optical illusion paintings are the works of a master of hand pixelated art pieces.

Pintaldi’s paintings might look naturalistic, but they’re far from it when you discover that each of his works comprises thousands of one-square centimetre pixels in only three colours: red, blue and green. But a mere three-colourway approach belies the backbreaking technique Pintaldi adopts in his craft, which draws similarities from the process of creating original television images.