PRESS RELEASE
Is art in the details?
Gabriele Di Matteo, in the exhibition Metri quadri di quadri, adds a new tactic to his set of methods for subverting art. For twenty years now he has been developing his own artistic system, which rudely shakes the established order, allowing us to see how fragile it is.
Di Matteo plays with the possibility of a moving subject in paintings. Paintings can be infinitely repeated, if the artist has the patience to copy them, or to make use of a copyist painter (one who does reproductions of original paintings) as he has done time and time again.
The exhibition introduces a series of close-ups from reproductions of famous paintings by the greatest painters in history: Goya, Lorenzo Lotto, El Greco, Giorgione and again Velazquez. It is a brief history of art that uses life-size details from paintings arranged on display walls in a way that respects their original positions on the famous canvases.
Through reproduction, duplication, movement and repetition, he reinforces the idea of painting as a maze of images. He shows that, as Leonardo da Vinci said, “the spirit guides the hand” and that art is created to free our senses, not to make walls for them.
Keitelman Gallery, 2014