It was during this time that Picasso came across the hand-tinting style which has since become his trade mark. "I couldn't bear to see perfectly good prints go to waste, so I started touching up unused ones by tinting them," says Poretti of how he came to develop his signature style.

As an artist living in Paris in the latter part of the seventies, Poretti could do little to avoid the influence punk's subcultural aesthetic was to have on the art world. Ever-eager to absorb the new, Poretti was attracted to the shock element of the punk aesthetic, and the resistance and will for freedom inherent in it. In 1976, when he participated in a joint photographic exhibition entitled Sex Parisienne in Neufchatel, Switzerland, Poretti demonstrated that this shock and freedom could be expressed via his black and white, hand-tinted photographs.

Poretti's attraction to punk drew him also to Andy Warhol, whose work on the magazine Facade was to inspire Poretti found his own magazine on leaving Paris in 1979.After leaving T-Ribalta in 1981, Poretti found himself part of an Italian film crew bound for Bali to make a video clip. "I was moping around with a broken heart and this friend of mine was part of the film crew and he said 'Why don't you come to Bali with us?' So I did." A year later, having closed down the magazine and packed up his studio, Poretti was back in Bali, where he planned to stay for a year before moving on to Warhol's The Factory in New York. But Poretti never made it to The Factory, as for the next seventeen years he immersed himself in Bali.

For Poretti, that immersion process involved becoming a student at the islandÕs School of the Arts (Sekolah Menengah Seni Rupa: SMSR) in Batubulan, Gianyar between 1986 and 1990, and later at DenpasarÕs Academy of Arts (Institut Seni Rupa Indonesia: ISI)between 1990 and 1994. It also involved forging close friendships with local artists, among them painters Made Wianta and Nyoman Gunarsa.

PORETTI MEETS HIS MUSE
Poretti's final years in Bali have been anything but an anti-climactic. For in 1997, just two years before he was to leave the island, and after a fifteen year wait, Poretti met his muse, Grace Jones, a moment that resulted in a series of black and white, hand tinted photographs, and digital images collectively referred to as Poretti's Grace Jones period.

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