It was one of those days that I would call the same as a thousand others, when we immerse ourselves in socials to postpone the tediousness of real life.

Sometimes I believe that Meta’s algorithm perceives our moods; perhaps it measures the pressure with which we touch the screen of our mobile phone and, through an artificial intelligence, assigns it a precise mood.

The fact is that that day, the algorithm began to propose images of worlds that resemble our own, but slightly distorted. Women in improbably wigs appeared; decadent scenes inhabited by replicated female figures on murals hidden in niches and doorways; still but familiar landscapes that I felt belonged to me. And most of all, a little girl dressed in orange or living in an orange world, which strongly reminded me of the massacre perpetuated nowadays.

That is how I discovered Roberto Brunetti’s visual proposal and here I am writing about him, having met and listened to him. There are images that we look at, and images that look back at us. Those of Roberto Brunetti belong to the second category.

A designer by trade, former stage designer by training, photographer by nature and visual storyteller by expressive necessity, Roberto has traversed thirty years of trade between publishing, advertising and visual art, to find himself today in a creative territory that defies definition: an alchemic workshop where graphics, cinema, writing, music and artificial intelligence coexist.

Art is the ghost of the world’s past, whispering to the deaf about the beauty we’ve so eagerly buried.

Born in Bari in 1965, after attending art school and the Academy of Fine Arts, he embarked on a career path that saw him win international awards at the age of 29, when he won first prize in the Linotype-Hell AG competition in 1994 for the creation of experimental fonts. But the real turning point came two years ago, with his entry – free, conscious, non-ideological – into the universe of generative artificial intelligence.

As he defines himself, Roberto has always been figurative, instinctive, carnal, with his hand running faster than thought; yet, for years he chased abstraction, the sign reduced to its essence, the eloquent void that was not allowed to him, because his sign, he says, ‘spoke too much.

The unlucky don’t wait for disaster; it’s already on the doorstep, asking for tea

His curious and experimental spirit meant that when AI appeared in the artistic sector, he quickly took possession of it, seeing it as one more tool in his palette of possibilities. For Brunetti, AI is not a fashion to chase, nor an enemy to fight. It is a medium, a filter, a catalyst. A powerful tool for telling stories that need new forms. ‘I am not looking for photographic truth, but emotional truth,’ he says.

Roberto is artistically a hybrid because he does not limit himself to graphic design and set design but enriches his creativity with music. What holds everything he proposes together is music. His reels originate as video clips, often on unreleased tracks to create customized soundtracks. Every element is chosen, every tone calibrated. There is an invisible care behind every chaos.

There is no solitude where ghosts are excellent conversationalists

His creative process often starts with real photographs – vintage shots, Apulian folklore, expressionist atmospheres, 1950s science fiction – reworked through AI, where error is an integral part of the result. There are no montages. Everything is born within the generative engine, fed by complex prompts, as if Brunetti were feeding the machine his unconscious.

There is a splendor in the shattered, where nothing more can be lost

Roberto uses the AI, or rather, tests it, challenges it. He looks for those borderline places of knowledge of the generative engine (i.e. the set of images with which the AI model has been trained), in which the model, forced to give an answer, offers solutions that are sometimes utopian and other times dystopian and in any case ‘random’. They are not errors but answers of a limited logic, as Gessica Rabbit would say: ‘I am not bad, it’s just that they draw me like this’! Roberto therefore researches the limits of AI knowledge in which different realities mix to create improbable but possible images.

To remember is to repaint a ruin with colours you whish you had seen

Brunetti’s intention in creating these images, however, is not to make photographs, but stage sets. His images are frontal, full of stillness, in which the gaze or the pose of the people present are at one with the settings; there is not a breath of wind in his landscapes; the light is strong, direct, taking us back to the scorching summer afternoons of southern Italy, in which nothing moves, and everything freezes in the heat.

Gilded mirrors may reflect, but they rarely reveal

Roberto does not like to give titles to the series he creates, but the images are collected in pragmatically named folders: Murals, Landscapes, People). The ‘Murales’ series has much of a metaphor for his life: the crumbling houses tell of the ruin, the disintegration of the things that have been built; the woman in the foreground represents the origin and the element from which to start again; the murals represent hope, the dream, the aspiration… even if in Brunetti’s images this dream is deliberately very close to reality. Sometimes there are figures in a third floor that seem to spy; wanting to enter but not daring; leaving because they have realized that there is nothing to do there; they are eyes watching in the half-light.

The croocked frame on the wall holds the most vivid picture, because the eye is drawn to what tilts

In this series, the images cannot be separated from what Roberto writes to accompany them, which is equally splendid, revealing a depth of thought and a delicacy of soul that move me. Texts written with instinct and lucidity, ironic or raw, always sincere, often destabilizing. ‘They tell me I write with my gut – and that’s OK,’ he confesses.

The multitudinous and transversal community that Roberto has managed to aggregate on Istagram (@robertobrunetti_ita) is attracted not only by the aesthetic strength of his images, but by the depth of the themes he deals with: women’s condition, civil rights, poverty, war, loneliness, redemption. And maybe this is the reason why an important part of the community that actively follows him on IG are mature men and women from Tehran, Ankara; people who in some cases do not have freedom of expression in their homeland. This fills Roberto with pride because he perceives himself as a messenger of their impediments. I think that his whole community recognises itself in the imaginary worlds Roberto proposes, because they are not exotic worlds, but emotional places, zones of memory and consciousness.

People will always tell you who you are, especially when they haven’t the faintest idea

In the ‘Landscapes’ series, Roberto imagines places that do not exist but belong to each of us; he creates places of contemplation in which we feel good and which make us feel the harmony of being part of the Universe. Places in which one takes refuge, or from which one would like to escape. Superstitious shots, he calls them, published to exorcise bad days and have the strength to face them.

Roberto has reached a point in his life where he does not seek consensus. He only publishes what he feels. And this sincerity has created genuine bonds. In addition to admirers, he has also garnered detractors (who at times have become violent in their reactions), frightened by AI, scandalized by the directness of the messages that are being dispersed, annoyed by his writing that is too real. But the point is not to please everyone. The point is to open doors…even the seemingly sealed ones.

The queen is dead. Long live the queen!

An artist’s freedom of expression and creativity (even if Roberto denies being an artist, not out of false modesty, but out of respect for art) must propose his own vision, which springs from the rivulets of his own experience and which serves others to open windows that would otherwise remain closed and which instead allow them to meet, evoke, question, reflect and feel. Roberto Brunetti considers himself an emotional entertainer, a storyteller through images. His works do not ask for approval: they ask to be heard… and in a time of noise, this is perhaps the rarest form of communication.