"Each artist creates his, or her, predecessors. Van Eyck and Vermeer, Rembrandt and Cranach whisper in the ears of Bertelli & Guaitoli. They work like Northern Renaissaince painters, although they use a digital devices instead of brush.

The light, which seems to emanate from the faces, never dazzles, nor blinds. It gently reveals and lights up skin tones, looks, moods and inner, secret feelings. Subjects portrayed by Bertelli & Guaitoli get back that ‘aura’ Walter Benjamin said that art had hopelessly lost - precisely because of photography - at the beginning of twentieth century (The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction, 1935).

Colors, even those which are traditionally classified as ‘cold’ like light blue, become in their works warm, intense, soft and blended with the most sophisticated use of shadow.

The material support in these works of art - a wrinkled rice paper - is as important as the images printed on it. It reminds the epidermis with its fragility, its delicacy, but also its silent strength in resisting time and efforts that life involves.

In the absence of the most coated and glossy smoothness, these portraits save the integrity and the purity of a beauty which has no boundaries between inside and outside."

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CRISTINA MUCCIOLI