In A Night With Friends, Pareti depicts a casual evening walk that quickly becomes something less straightforward. Streetlights wash over faces, replacing natural colour with strange, almost cinematic hues of neon reflections – colours so characteristic of cities after dark. Painted in realist style, the scene resembles a photograph drawn from a camera roll. We all have one like it: nighttime, our friends slightly tipsy, eyes closed, walking towards the next bar, perhaps, or to the bus stop to catch the night bus. I can almost hear them talking – the music spilling out from the bars they pass, the cars driving by. The city is alive, and so is the painting. The scene is recognisable, yet memory has already begun to reshape it.
The Taxi Driver shifts the focus from companionship to solitude. A stationary taxi sits quietly on a street in Kyoto, its illuminated interior cutting through the darkness. Inside, the driver waits; outside, the city appears to hold its breath. The painting provides a counterpoint to A Night With Friends. Here, we’re on the outside looking in, and silence surrounds us. Instead of music, I hear cicadas, a quiet hum in the distance. Nothing dramatic happens, yet stillness itself becomes the subject.
Rather than celebrating the spectacle of urban life, these paintings linger on moments that usually pass unnoticed: a conversation between friends, a driver waiting for the next passenger, a street suspended between one destination and another. Night slows the city down just enough to reveal what daylight often obscures - that even the most ordinary moments can carry an unexpected sense of mystery.
Andrea Pareti (b. 1998, Grosseto) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. His paintings explore the relationship between people and the urban spaces they move, with a particular focus on the city at night. He studied Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna before completing his MA at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. In 2025, he presented his first solo exhibition, Istanti Urbani, and was a finalist in the 17th edition of the Prisma Art Prize.
Text by Maria Myasnikova