Gradali and D'Isa: Two Italian Artists Using AI with Opposite Philosophies

In a feature on Artribune, Marco Senaldi examines how two Italian contemporary artists, Diego Maria Gradali and Francesco D'Isa, employ artificial intelligence in fundamentally different ways. Gradali, an hyperrealist painter, forces AI to abandon its natural smoothness, imposing error, stain, and texture to mimic the gestural quality of oil painting. He uses AI to generate a virtual image (e.g., a girl with a red scarf) which he then paints in oil on canvas, making the digital appear analog. D'Isa, a philosopher and artist, pushes AI toward a "metapictorial expressivity," creating images that seem ancient but could not exist without algorithmic calculation. His work evokes a dialogue between Klimt and Hopper, transfigured through computation. The article references David Hockney's 2001 book "Secret Knowledge" to argue that technology has always been the secret ingredient of creativity, and that today's challenge is no longer about optics but about silicon. Senaldi frames the two artists as embodying opposite approaches: Gradali is autographic (drawing technology toward the physicality of the artwork), while D'Isa is allographic (the image results from linguistic notation, the prompt). Both maintain a recognizable style in an era where anyone can generate billions of images with a click.