Paul Thorel Prize – 3rd edition
The imperfections
The imperfections are the antidote to algorithmic perfection. They are the unforeseen: technical failure and human error collapsing into one another—not accidentally, but deliberately. In the exhibition, curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini, Caterina De Nicola, Irene Fenara, and Lorenza Longhi, recipients of the 3rd Paul Thorel Prize for digital arts, search for a human dimension within a society overstimulated by the digital.
Against the abstraction and apparent precision of data, these artists—born in the early 1990s—deploy do-it-yourself tactics and cultivate an interest in glitches and residual materials extracted from the worlds of consumption and control. Imperfections are precisely this: a complex, plural term that captures their attempt to intensify our relationship with a reality that is increasingly codified and shaped by techno-financial automation.
The exhibition unfolds as a journey from outer space to the underground, both visual and mental, countering the homogenizing logic of machines and exposing the limits of the digital, now fully embedded in the infrastructure of the present. It is an exercise in subtle resistance, in defense of a reality that remains uncertain, opaque, and irreducibly human.
The Paul Thorel Prize is a platform dedicated to the Italian and international art scene, with a focus on digital arts and the contemporary image as both language and aesthetic horizon. Each year, the Paul Thorel Foundation, together with a committee of experts, curators, and museum directors, selects twelve artists with new projects to be developed during a residency designed to reactivate Paul Thorel’s spaces and working tools in Naples, where the artist relocated his studio in 1994. A jury then selects three winners, whose commissioned works are produced and presented by the Foundation in partnership with a museum institution. These partners have included Naples' Gallerie d’Italia (2024) and Museo Madre - Fondazione Donnaregina for contemporary arts (2025), and Museo MACRO in Rome (2026). The Foundation also publishes an artist’s book for each winner in collaboration with NERO Editions.
The projects of the 3rd edition of the Paul Thorel Prize were selected by a committee comprising Ilaria Bonacossa (Director, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa), Michele Bertolino (Curator, Centro Pecci, Prato), Valentino Catricalà (Member of the Advisory Board, ZKM, Karlsruhe), and Gea Politi (Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Flash Art). Together with Andrea Bellini (Director, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement), Eva Fabbris (Director, Museo Madre, Naples), and Sara Dolfi Agostini (Curator, Paul Thorel Foundation, Naples), and with the participation of Guido Costa (President, Paul Thorel Foundation), they chose the winning projects.
THE PAUL THOREL FOUNDATION is an art institution rooted in the Mediterranean, headquartered in Naples, with two satellite venues on the islands of Panarea and Hydra. The Foundation is located in the former studio of Italian-French artist Paul Thorel (1956–2020), a pioneer of the electronic image and digital photography. Established by the artist to preserve and promote his work and his collection of Italian and international contemporary art, since 2022 the Foundation is a hybrid space for exhibition, production, and experimentation, always open to the public. Both archive and laboratory, it is conceived as a hospitable environment where artistic practice and research coexist without hierarchy. Its activities include work on the artist’s catalogue raisonné and a prize dedicated to digital arts, all with a program that brings together residencies, commissions, exhibitions, and public conversations among artists, critics, and visitors.
CATERINA DE NICOLA (born in Ortona in 1991; lives in Zurich) studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and at ECAL in Lausanne. She is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, performance, sound, sculpture, and photography. In her practice, she engages with the circulation of cultural forms, investigating how images, symbols, and materials are reused, displaced, and progressively emptied of meaning within contemporary systems.
IRENE FENARA (born in Bologna in 1990; lives in Milan) holds both a BA and an MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Her work focuses on surveillance cameras, ubiquitous elements of the contemporary urban landscape. By exploring these machine “artificial eyes,” as well as visual error and thresholds of perception, she reconfigures images generated by technological devices into poetic and ambiguous forms.
LORENZA LONGHI (born in Lecco in 1991; lives in Zurich) studied Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and Visual Arts at ECAL in Lausanne. In her practice, she uses objects—or their reproductions—drawn from fashion, design, and communication, which embody structures of power. Through traditional techniques, she transforms and recomposes them, amplifying their meaning and mimetic effect within society.