Variants
Variants (2021-ongoing) is a body of work in which Assunta Ruocco layers water-based oils over digital pigment prints on archival paper to explore the multiplicity of a single image and the unstable nature of memory. Drawing from a personal archive of early 2000s photographs—featuring family members in charged, domestic settings—the series excavates a traumatic family history through repetition, constraint, and material re-inscription. Each image is developed through a recursive process of scanning, printing, and repainting, using a restricted colour palette to stage subtle shifts in form and tone. Rather than progressing toward resolution, the works remain unstable and open-ended: each iteration interrupts the last, exposing the layered temporality of memory and the non-linearity of the painting process.
Printer malfunctions, digital artefacts, and surface irregularities are folded into the composition as generative disruptions, allowing accidents to participate in the construction of meaning. The series operates in a liminal space between index and invention, digital trace and painterly gesture—foregrounding the recursive logic of contemporary image production and the affective density of translation across media. Liquid Memory is not a finished set of works, but a cumulative practice: an evolving archive of image-variants that bear the marks of time, technology, and emotional sediment.