Italian artist's sellout pixel paintings

"GO near the painting and take a close look. Notice how you don't see any detail but colour. And then stand back to see the full picture with all the fine details again," urges Valter Spagno, one of the partners of Partners & Mucciaccia Gallery at Gillman Barracks. He repeatedly urges one to do so for the different paintings, trying to get the visitor to share his admiration for painter Cristiano Pintaldi's fascinating technique.

While Mr Pintaldi's paintings might look naturalistic, a closer look reveals how it's made up of one square centimetre pixels, in only three primary colours of red, green and blue. To further illustrate Mr Pintaldi's optical illusion paintings, Mr Spagno uses his phone camera to zoom in on a section, to snap a shot of the green, red and blue pixels; while to the naked eye, at a distance, the colour of that patch is white.

"It's all about the light," explains Mr Pintaldi, and how he gradates the three colours to create light and darkness. That's how he explains it at first, but this simplistic explanation belies the laborious technique Pintaldi employs - in his mimicking of how original TV images are created.