03/09/2026
10 September 2026 Curva Pura is pleased to invite you for the opening of “Inside the First Image” , a solo exhibition by Martin Bertelmann, with a critical text by Nicoletta Provenzano.
The exhibition brings together photographic works and video installations that explore the nature of the image and the act of looking as a fundamental mode of human knowledge, at the shifting threshold between the analogue and the digital. Vision is an essential means through which we explore, understand and recognise the world, and through which we establish our relationship with the reality we inhabit—natural, social and bound to identity.
By interrogating the image and the infinite strata of meaning inscribed within it, Bertelmann investigates temporality in the tension between immediacy and impermanence, and in relation to the aura of originality within the digital age. His practice engages with photography as a language that seeks the index of the existent within reality, precisely through the elusive, fragile and ephemeral nature of human passage, the material objects through which it manifests itself, and the limits of human visual perception when set against the seemingly all-encompassing gaze of the machine.
Within the continuous and undifferentiated flow of simulacra that constitutes the uncritical dimension and latent space of the digital, Inside the First Image unfolds as a passage through the forms of apprehending a fugitive visible, through the image and its mise en abyme. The exhibition thus situates the act of looking within a space of tension between presence and representation, between the immediacy of perception and the endless mediation of the image.
