Our Artistic Director Marco Crispano interviewed Francesca Interlenghi for the Prisma Art Prize. Their conversation explores contemporary painting today—its hybrid languages, its dialogue with space, and the pressures of “flat culture”—as well as art writing, how to build a critical gaze without “closing” the work, and what it means to judge emerging practices within an award context.
Francesca Interlenghi is a writer and art author, and the founder of the blog The Dummy’s Tales. She describes approaching art through writing, with a perspective guided by emotion and direct experience, and continues her work through independent platforms as well as international editorial collaborations.
M.: If you had to describe contemporary painting today with a single word, which would you use and why?
F.: I would use words like hybrid, composite, complex. One defining feature of contemporary painting is that it no longer settles into the abstraction/figuration duality, but explores a range of possibilities that lie between these two poles. So I would say a hybrid painting today, one that dialogues with other disciplines, with space, with architecture.
M.: So which word would you never use?
F.: Static. Traditional, if by traditional we mean tied to the support.
M.: And when you’re at an exhibition, or on a studio visit, what do you understand at first impact in front of a painting to decide whether it’s worth staying and looking at it longer?
F.: I have to make a premise: not having an academic background in art, what guides me is always only emotion. If there is something that hooks my emotionality, I can stand still in front of a work for hours. It’s something very instinctive, very emotional, very little rational. I came to art through writing, not through the studies I did.
M.: For me too it’s a gut thing: sometimes there’s something beautiful that doesn’t interest me, other times I find myself looking two centimeters away at a chemical reaction in a corner of the painting… that looks like a wound.
F.: Yes. Then, in a second phase, more technical evaluations come in, which over time I have learned to articulate thanks to field experience, the many dialogues with artists, interviews, and all the things I’ve written over the last ten years. But at first glance it’s always an unknown that has to break through to my heart.
M.: In painting today, is there anything that seems truly new to you? A breaking point, a direction, a common thread that has never been there before?
F.: It would be ambitious to say that there is something truly new. There are a series of experimental attempts: this opening of painting to dialogue with other disciplines; painting that becomes sculpture; painting contaminated by other materials; painting that dialogues with space, with architecture. I find it a more polysemic language. “New new” maybe not, or maybe I haven’t seen it yet.
M.: Maybe the new is more in the context around painting, in the system. Then with the spread of Instagram the way we, almost digital natives, develop has been turned upside down: we are bombarded by images continuously.
F.: This is a big problem, if we want to reflect on the theme of the new. A negative characteristic of what today is defined as “flat culture” is that everything is immediately available and everything is on the same horizontal plane. Another requirement that is disappearing, helped along by the media bombardment we are constantly subjected to, is the fact of no longer privileging direct experience with the work. Today everything is extremely fast and this doesn’t allow us to let thought settle. What’s missing is the time of metabolization, the time of reflection, the time of thought: everything moves to the rhythm of clicks.
M.: What is the biggest risk for an emerging painter in 2026?
F.: The biggest risk is being overwhelmed by trends, by what the market wants. This prevents them from doing authentic, true, deep research. I often see that, since it’s very hard because the system is complex and the economic climate even more so, there is the risk of catering to the needs of the market, putting one’s own research in the background. Young emerging artists need to keep a line of inquiry that is faithful to their own thinking.
M.: What are the signs that an artist is building a research practice and not just a sellable portfolio?
F.: Coherence. Very often I see portfolios that start one way and end another, because they were built ad hoc, to serve other needs. The coherence and depth of one’s thinking, the will and the ability to carry it forward despite everything, is what makes the difference between an artist I consider relevant and other experiences that are instead fluctuating, and therefore hard to read.
M.: Like when you’re job hunting: they tell you you have to tailor your CV for each company.
F.: Exactly. It’s understandable, I don’t judge it. But you can really see it in terms of the coherence of the work, and in the portfolio it’s absolutely evident.
M.: Moving to writing: what relationship is there today between the artwork and writing?
F.: I have a terrible relationship with publishing, especially Italian publishing. 2026 opened with an American collaboration ( wedotart.com ), but I find that today it is fairly useless to write about art, because what you have to write is always somehow oriented. I continue to do it on my blog ( thedummystales.com ) and, in general, in the “places” where I can express my language and my sensibility freely. Doing it abroad seems, at least for the moment, easier.
M.: When you write in your own space, is there a rule, a method, a boundary you impose so as not to close off an interpretation?
F.: Over time my blog has become a space for people who don’t have space in the traditional press, to whom I give a voice with my narrative, which is always tied to the sensations the work triggers in me. Precisely because I don’t have an academic background, I don’t like to place myself as a judge: I always try to look with the curiosity of someone who doesn’t know and has a great desire to know. To write, you have to stay one step behind what you look at and who you look at, otherwise you can’t see it.
M.: Do you remember the moment you realized you wanted to write about art? What were you looking for?
F.: In 2016: I walked into the Raffaella Cortese gallery. I saw the exhibition by Barbara Bloom, an American conceptual artist, and I was struck by it. There was an installation of several carpets, placed at different heights, forming a kind of sky of clouds, accompanied by a very lyrical passage by André Gide taken from The Immoralist. I stayed there for so long that Raffaella came down from her office and asked if everything was okay. I didn’t know who I was speaking to. I looked at her and asked: “I have a tiny blog, I have no numbers, I’m nobody, but can I write about this show?” She said: “Just let me read the article before you put it online on your blog.” From that day, I kept writing about art. Raffaella Cortese was the person who opened the doors of this world to me.
M.: What does it mean for you to judge a work within an art prize?
F.: It’s the first experience I’ve had, and I thank you. I did it with a sense of responsibility: I tried to evaluate the works not only from a formal point of view but also for the sensations they gave back to me, even though they were seen through a screen. I tried to understand what moved me: in a work there is always the possibility of recognizing a fragment of one’s own identity. The quality of the works this year was high and I reasoned with an outlook of support, of appreciation, without the desire to set myself up as a judge, but trying to make a small contribution to help emerging artists.
M.: Do you want to add anything? A question of your choice?
F.: I had started to look with suspicion at this revitalization of painting, as if it were a trend or a fashion. Instead I see that generations from the ’90s onward are breaking away from the cultural legacy we have very strongly in Italy around painting. What I see I don’t know if it is truly new painting, but there is a tension toward a search for the new, a construction of a language that frees itself from the figuration/abstraction polarity.
M.: There’s also a lot of psychological interest flowing into painting. We artists today use painting as an instrument of self-awareness, almost therapy: we are the first generation with a psychological awareness different from that of our parents. Many use the painterly instrument as a crowbar to dig into ourselves.
F.: I think it is also an instrument for reading the spirit of the times, marked by endemic fragility and structural uncertainty about the future. And even though painting is not my medium of choice, because for me it is contemporary sculpture, I am learning to appreciate it. There are interesting things in this revitalization.
