John Berger proposed that the decline of religion corresponded with the rise of the photograph, writing that “the camera surveys us like God” — a statement made decades before the proliferation of smartphones and the vast expansion of image circulation online. Today, as the number of images continues to grow exponentially, painting persists in a complex relationship with its own obsolescence, undergoing cycles of dissolution and re-emergence.

Working primarily in painting, Michael Ciavarella draws on found imagery sourced online, engaging processes of searching, collecting and cataloguing. His practice examines the construction and manipulation of images within contemporary visual culture, treating image selection as a form of retrieval from the dispersed remnants of an image-saturated world.

Across his work, Ciavarella is interested in the myth-making of contemporary and historical figures, and the role images play in shaping and stabilising meaning. Through repetition and the mimetic logic of photography, his paintings reflect on how images are read, circulated and reconstituted. Occupying a space between earnestness and absurdity, his work engages the ongoing relevance of figurative painting within an expanded field of mediation and representation.