PAREIDOLISM: Manifesto and Theorization of a Visionary Art Movement
(Formulation and definition based on the work of Carlo Soricelli)
1. Definition
Pareidolism is an art movement that places pareidolia at the core of the aesthetic and creative experience—the innate human tendency to recognize familiar forms, faces, and figures within chaotic, random, or seemingly meaningless structures. In Pareidolism, this unconscious ability becomes the conscious engine of the creative act, transforming chance into vision and the formless into revelation.
2. Origins and Context
Although pareidolia has been utilized by many artists throughout history—from Arcimboldo to the Surrealists, from Rorschach tests to clouds in children's paintings—Pareidolism as a movement was born consciously and systematically with Carlo Soricelli, an Italian artist, sculptor, and painter who made it one of his most radical pursuits. Far from mere decorativism or visual play, Soricelli’s Pareidolism is rooted in a critical and spiritual vision of the contemporary era, becoming a tool for denunciation, introspection, and regeneration.
3. Technique and Creative Process
Pareidolism is not a rigid technique, but rather a perceptive and compositional mindset. However, recurring steps can be identified in Soricelli’s work that constitute a methodology:
Creative collection and destruction of images: Old art magazines, advertisements, and posters serve as starting materials.
Random or semi-random recombination: Fragments are torn, overlapped, and glued onto complex surfaces such as ceilings, beams, and furniture.
Waiting and active observation: The artist observes the raw material until images (faces, scenes, creatures, dramas) spontaneously emerge, seemingly wanting to "reveal themselves."
Minimal and respectful intervention: The artist does not impose, but rather highlights with subtle retouches the images brought to light by pareidolia.
Architectural and immersive context: Pareidolic works are not just paintings, but often total environments: ceilings, rooms, objects.
4. Aesthetics and Values
Pareidolism moves outside rational control and the rules of the art market. It does not seek conventional beauty, but the emergence of the invisible and the recovery of meaning within fragmentation. The founding values of the movement are:
Vision: The artist does not create from scratch, but sees what already exists within chaos.
Listening to the collective unconscious: Pareidolic figures often carry universal, spiritual, political, and historical messages.
Rejection of linearity: Time, space, and narrative logic shatter to favor simultaneity and revelation.
Reuse and transformation: Discarded, consumed materials are elevated to tools of truth.
Revelation of good and evil: In Soricelli's pareidolism, one finds both angelic figures and contemporary monsters. It is a Sistine Hell of our time.
5. The Role of the Observer
In Pareidolism, the observer is an integral part of the work. Figures emerge differently for everyone and can change over time. The pareidolic work is alive, unstable, and multidimensional. It does not dictate; it invites one to see. In this sense, it is also a spiritual act, akin to meditation or prophecy.
6. Comparison with Other Movements
Surrealism: Unlike Surrealism, it does not originate from dreams or automatism, but from existing images reassembled in reality.
Dadaism: Unlike Dadaism, it aims not at the absurd, but at hidden meaning.
Informal Art: Unlike Informal Art, it does not dissolve the figure, but causes it to emerge from chaos.
Pop Art: It stands deeply apart from Pop Art, as it does not celebrate consumerism, but redeems it by transforming the remnants of the modern world into vision.
7. Carlo Soricelli's Pareidolism
In the work of Carlo Soricelli, Pareidolism intertwines with:
Pranic Painting: Adding an energetic and healing dimension.
Refusalism (Rifiutismo): Understood as a poetics of social, political, and material refusal.
Ethical and Prophetic Vision: Denouncing the evils of power, war, and injustice.
His pareidolic works are never neutral: they are distorting mirrors of our era, voices crying out in the silence, calls to the sacred within the profane. The space of his house-museum, the transformed ceilings, tables, and mannequins become places of collective vision and spiritual narrative.
8. Possible Future Developments
Pareidolism can evolve in many directions:
As a pedagogical tool to awaken imagination in children and young people.
As a therapeutic language in psychological and spiritual realms.
As a form of participatory art, where pareidolas are sought together by artists and the public.
As visual resistance against the perceptive flattening induced by media and non-creative artificial intelligence.
Conclusion
Pareidolism is not merely an art movement: it is an invitation to see differently, to find soul where nothing seems left. In an age tending toward homogenization, the pareidolic artist is a dowser of meaning, a priest of the fragment, a guardian of mystery.
"The Sistine Chapel of the Contemporary Hell"
A visionary journey into the work of Carlo Soricelli
In the heart of the studio of Carlo Soricelli—painter, sculptor, and activist for labor dignity—an uneasy, vibrant sky opens up: over 40 square meters of ceiling representing not the divine, but our era. A monumental yet still secret work, built entirely through a mixed painting technique based on pareidolia—the uniquely human ability to discern faces and shapes where there appear to be none.
This time, however, it is not just about inner visions, but a true contemporary hell. A prominent journalist from Il Resto del Carlino witnessed this, comparing the ceiling to the narrative energy of the Sistine Chapel: not for its sacredness, but for its impact.
The images merge, chase each other, tear apart, and recombine in a unique iconographic density where every fragment is a visual cry. Within it, we find militarism, repression, power that imprisons—and the evil that escapes its own cages. One can read conflict, the madness of consumerism, lost spirituality, surveillance, and forgotten yet ever-present wars.
And then the bodies, the faces, the wide-open or extinguished eyes: fragments that seem to come from ancient paintings, yet reveal themselves, upon closer inspection, to be shifting optical illusions. Nothing is as it appears. As with pareidolia, the true meaning shows itself only to those ready to see it.
Soricelli—already the creator of Rifiutismo (Refusalism) in the 1980s and Pittura Pranica (Pranic Painting) in 1997—achieves an extreme synthesis between art, civil consciousness, and unconscious language with this work. The ceiling, structured as a total work of art, is simultaneously a denunciation and a meditation, chaos and structure.
This work is not only a technical masterpiece, but a document of our era. And it demands to be seen and studied.
