Improbabilità (2021) investigates Stefano Contiero’s fascination with pareidolia, that peculiar human tendency to perceive meaningful forms within randomness. A concept started in 2019 and completed in September 2021, this collection of 33 carefully curated generative works transforms the artist’s bicultural heritage and fragmented identity into visual puzzles that challenge the boundaries between presence and absence. The collection’s title, translating to “improbability,” reflects both the statistical unlikelihood of the shapes that emerge from algorithmic processes and the profound uncertainty that defines human perception itself.
Contiero’s approach here is deliberately ambiguous, offering forms that hover between recognition and abstraction. The Processing-based algorithm generates unexpected shapes and figures that appear to coalesce momentarily before dissolving back into digital matter. These works echo the psychological investigations of surrealists like René Magritte and Max Ernst, who similarly explored the liminal spaces where meaning crystallizes from ambiguity. Yet Contiero’s approach is distinctly contemporary, using code as a medium to explore what he describes as “seeing beyond seeing with your eyes,” inviting viewers into active participation with the work’s interpretive possibilities.
The final 33 were selected from a larger generative field, reflecting the artist’s emerging understanding of curation as an essential component of generative practice. Each piece functions as evidence of perception itself, offering what the artist calls “proof” that nonetheless leaves the viewer questioning their own visual certainty. This exploration of perceptual uncertainty and “seeing beyond seeing” finds its technical and conceptual culmination in 1 + 1 = 3 (2023), where visual impossibility becomes literal through anaglyph 3D technology that requires viewers to change their perspective to access hidden dimensions.
The provocative artist statement, “Here’s the proof. And yet, nobody believes you,” encapsulates the collection’s central tension between empirical evidence and subjective experience. By positioning the viewer as both witness and skeptic, Contiero creates space for the kind of intimate revelation that occurs when we allow ourselves to see beyond the literal, embracing the improbable as a gateway to deeper understanding of both art and ourselves.