His confrontation with reality, the iconic pleasure in deciphering it, even where it briefly led to an objective realism, was the highest and, above all, current question that he posed to painting. Carotenuto celebrated its illusory component, favoring the path of recognizable or apparently recognizable images, his refuge to indulge the enigma of seeing as the fruit not of instinct, but of knowledge: a path on which he built his own profession, sinking into the wise use of technique, into the meaning and weight of colors. A story that he was able to bring back to the present, removing it from banality, with the lightness of intelligence. The painting manifests the artist's adherence to a psychoanalytic investigation of the subject. Even with a careful transcription of realistic details, the composition has a symbolic force, capable of recalling the poetic "concept" of universal motherhood.