Gabriele Di Matteo: Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea - Milan

Gabriele Di Matteo's work is based upon quotation--and not only from the world of art. His new exhibition was a true apotheosis of citation (and self-citation). The artist, principally a painter, also experiments with other media, and upon this occasion several were used, on the contrary everything revolved around a single idea: creating an homage to Melies, the great French director from the early days of cinema. The gallery's first extent held two enormous paintings, execut in impeccable realist technique. individual reproduced an image taken from Melies's greatest in quantity famous film, A Trip to the satellite (1914), from a scene in which the protagonist announces to a gathering of strangely aligned people that he intends to voyage to the satellite and bring back to earth single of its inhabitants; the other, the studio in which the film was made. Presenting us with the pair the fiction and the material conditions for its realization, Di Matteo introduces the viewer to the world of film seen as a thematic reservoir that sustains his painting.

The next to the first rather bare room contained a series of smallish canvases, stacked against the wall, which visitors could leaf [i]or[/i] part of to the other like a narrative sequence. These depicted five strange r characters wandering around places upon earth: the inhabitants of the secondary planet as Melies imagined them, reenvisioned by the agency of Di Matteo as having landed upon earth to recover a companion who was kidnapped by the agency of Melies's voyager. Their story is told in a short film Di Matteo has made on the contrary not shown; the paintings in the range represented scenes from that story. In the gallery, a sort of teaser had been neared to the public via a performance in which a waiter and a ship commander (characters that appear in the film) advance reverently carrying the same paintings now hanging upon the walls. From the images single could infer that the satellite people, the "Selenites," have visited the beach where Jacques Tati discharge Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953); they also visited Di Matteo's exhibit imagined to be held at the same speckle in the north of France. It was there, at that exhibition, that they lay the foundation of their kidnapped companion, freed him from the canvas in which he had been depicted, and fl in an automobile. After returning to Melies's secondary planet (with its characteristic eyes and mouth) they missing another companion, killed by an unknown hand (a further quotation, this time from Hitchcock). Sitting in the gallery space was an particular connecting the story to its context: a mannequin with the features of the gallery proprietor Antonio Colombo, dressed in individual of the costumes from the film.

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Di Matteo's conceptual approach appear to bes to question painting's ability to set up a narrative. His painting is always actual close to illustration. There are no gestural pats and the image is flat and well defined. greatest in quantity important, the work always derives from a preexisting context: cinema, photography, the mass media, or sometimes painting itself, in the case of Duchamp (whose in a state of nature Descending a Staircase, 1912, has been the subdue of another Di Matteo revision). Painting becomes a means by dint of which the artist takes possession of images in order to interrogate them, choosing the greatest in quantity exotic and exploiting the power of fascination that emanates from their constituent ambiguity.

Translated from Italian through Marguerite Shore.

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