Catalino’s technique:
where painting meets sculpture

These works are built, not painted. Where conventional painting applies pigment to a flat surface, Catalino constructs each piece from successive wet layers of natural lime, mineral pigments, oxides, and hand-mixed coloured mortars that are worked, carved, compressed, and excavated over time. The depth is physical rather than illusory. Earlier layers remain embedded beneath the final surface, giving each work the quality of something uncovered rather than simply composed.

Colour exists within the body of the material itself rather than resting on top of it. This is why it responds to light the way stone and plaster do, absorbing and releasing warmth across the day rather than remaining flat and inert. Matte mineral passages soften into shadow, raised planes catch illumination, and buried tonalities emerge gradually as the angle of light shifts. The work is never entirely still.