One hundred years of grattage: Giovanni Guida is creating what Ernst could never have imagined

Painting, in its most reductive definition, is an act of addition. You come to the canvas with pigment, with intention, with the accumulated grammar of your training, and you build. Giovanni Guida doesn't do that. He arrives at the canvas and begins, methodically, to take it apart.His medium is grattage, a technique with Surrealist origins, a history tied to psychic automatism and the excavation of the unconscious. But Guida has done something quietly audacious with it. He has turned an apophatic gesture into a devotional one. The visual language he works in is precise and deliberately ancient. Lapis lazuli, that impossible blue of Byzantine domes and Marian iconography, runs through his practice like a leitmotif. It's a colour that carries centuries of sacred meaning, and in Guida's hands, it doesn't feel borrowed. It feels inhabited.In this conversation, Guida speaks with the precision of a theologian and the instinct of a painter. Max Ernst invented grattage to reach the Freudian unconscious. You use the same technique to reach God. On its centenary — is that a continuation of his vision or a complete opposite of it?Giovanni Guida: It is neither a clean break nor a simple continuation; rather, it is an elevation—a vertical evolution. Max Ernst used grattage to excavate the horizontal layers of the Freudian unconscious, uncovering the untamed, subterranean forces of the psyche. My approach does not oppose this; it shifts the axis from the psychological to the ontological. If Ernst looked into the abyss of the ego, I look through the canvas to find what the Vedic tradition calls Atman and what Western mysticism calls the Divine. By scratching away the pigment, I am not trying to expose a hidden trauma, but rather to tear the veil of Maya to reveal the unconditioned Light beneath. On this centenary, my grattage honors Ernst’s method but changes the destination: we are no longer digging into the dark basement of the mind, but opening a window toward the Absolute. It is surrealism returning to its truest, most sacred origin: the search for a higher reality.Every artist has a moment when a technique stops being something they learned and starts being something they are. When did grattage become yours?Giovanni Guida: It happened when I stopped treating the canvas as a surface to be decorated and began treating it as a threshold to be crossed. In the beginning, you learn grattage as a mechanical act of subtraction. But there was a specific moment in my studio when the tool in my hand ceased to feel like an external instrument. I realized I wasn’t 'painting' anymore; I was performing an act of spiritual archeology. The exact turning point was when I stopped predicting the result. In traditional painting, you add brushstrokes to build an image you already intend. In my grattage, the final image is born from a dialogue with the unknown. When I understood that my role was not to impose a form, but to liberate a light that was already trapped under the dark layers of paint, grattage ceased to be a technique. It became my way of breathing, my way of seeing the world through the act of uncovering.Most artists build a surface. You grattage. What does it feel like the moment the canvas gives way and something unexpected comes through?Giovanni Guida: Most artistic traditions are Demiurgic—they add matter to a void, building a universe layer by layer. My process is apophatic, much like the theological concept of Via Negativa (knowing God by stating what He is not), or the Upanishadic Neti Neti ('not this, not this'). The moment the canvas gives way under my tools is a moment of profound vulnerability and suspense. It feels like an epiphany. There is a sacred tension because you are destroying one reality to allow another to be born. Through grattage, the tool penetrates the pigment to reveal what lies beneath, yet it allows it to be scrutinized not by trying to tear what is hidden away from its concealment, but rather by gazing at it within its very act of hiding. When that unexpected streak of light or texture breaks through, it feels as if the canvas itself is speaking. It is the exact visual translation of Anatta (non-self): the ego of the artist steps aside, the conscious mind surrenders, and the painting reveals its own true, unconditioned nature.Your Caesarius Diaconus has been placed beside actual relics of a saint in cathedrals across the world. At what point did you realise you weren't just making art anymore, you were making something people prayed near? Giovanni Guida: The realization came when I witnessed the shift in how the work was approached. In a museum, people look at a painting; in a cathedral, next to the relics of St. Caesarius, people look through it. It ceases to be an aesthetic object and becomes an acheiropoieton—an image not made by human hands, a liturgical mirror. Iconologically, an artwork placed next to a relic changes its ontological status: it absorbs the sacred aura of the space and the collective devotion of the faithful. When I saw the flicker of candle-light reflecting on the scratched surfaces of Caesarius Diaconus, and saw people bowing their heads near it, I felt a deep sense of responsibility. I realized that my art had become a bridge between the visible and the invisible. It was no longer about my signature or my skill, but about creating a space where silence and prayer could find a visual echo."Lapis Lazuli blue runs through almost everything you make. Is that a colour you chose, or one that chose you?Giovanni Guida: In the Western iconographic tradition, Lapis Lazuli is the color of the transcendent—the cloak of the Virgin Mary, the sky of Giotto, the hue of the unapproachable heavens. In the East, it is the color of the higher chakras, the infinite depth of consciousness. I like to think that Lapis Lazuli chose me because it demands a process of spiritual stripping, where the artist becomes immaterial, dissolving his own ego to 'un-veil' himself. Through grattage, scratching away the dark layers of pigment is an ascent to reach 'the blue of the gentle blueness of the sky, the true color of depth in which the Absolute manifests itself without veils.' This is not a superficial, blinding illumination. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger beautifully noted, this celestial depth is not a vain light: 'the splendor of its height is in itself the darkness of its all-embracing breadth.' Therefore, Lapis Lazuli chose me as an ontological reminder: it is a color that holds both the abyssal shadow and the cosmic dawn. Its true luminosity is only awakened when it is liberated from the surface, showing us that no matter how much darkness we lay upon the world, the underlying fabric of reality is an infinite, divine embrace.What's remarkable is the reception Guida’s work has found outside gallery walls entirely. Placed beside relics in active cathedrals, his paintings have entered the liturgical space, not as art objects to be admired, but as presences to be reckoned with.