Timelines

Full of technical feats and imaginative leaps, the works showcase an evolving, open-ended quest to, as he says, “reweird” ordinary life—to discover the uncanny life of familiar objects and scenarios.

Timelines presents the results of Tony Matelli’s ongoing search for the magic in trompe-l’oeil realism. It features garden-store and cemetery sculptures bedecked with lifelike fruits, vegetables, and other foodstuffs as well as exacting recreations of grimy, graffitied mirrors. Full of technical feats and imaginative leaps, the works showcase an evolving, open-ended quest to, as he says, “reweird” ordinary life—to discover the uncanny life of familiar objects and scenarios.

The Garden Sculptures began in 2014 with a spontaneous gesture. Matelli was carrying a bag of groceries to his Brooklyn home when he passed a burnt-out taxi. Without thinking, he placed a strawberry on it. He liked the pop of the fresh, red fruit on the charred metal, both as image and idea. He began to investigate the juxtaposition’s artistic potential, experimenting with broken washing machines and discarded machinery as settings for fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles that he would meticulously reproduce in painted bronze and cast silicone, even going so far as to include colored glass elements to simulate translucent citrus fruit. Eventually, he settled on cement and marble reproductions of ancient Greek and Roman, Chinese, and Renaissance sculptures purchased from garden stores and makers of cemetery monuments. Matelli’s decision to merge perishable food and durable sculpture was intuitive. They were interesting opposites, and he liked the way the stone figures’ pale colors offset the colorful foodstuffs as well as the pairing’s implied collisions of hard and soft, permanent and perishable.

The Dirty Mirrors series of paintings also inverts ideas of time and authenticity. It apotheosizes ephemeral, oftentimes vulgar graffiti, the kind made with a finger on the back of a grimy truck or the dirt on an unwashed window, by immortalizing it forever in enamel and urethane on mirror. In them, Matelli transforms the gesture and spirit of writing or drawing on, or simply smearing, a dusty mirror from subtractive to additive and from spontaneous to labor intensive. Starting with his own computer rendering, he makes a resist, or removable protective layer, in the shape of the work’s words and images and applies it to a mirror. Artificial dust is built up over the mirror’s surface using sprayed auto paint, and, after the resist is removed, parts of the exposed-glass graffiti are pushed back or pulled forward using an airbrush. As the viewer studies each work’s scrawls and doodles, they peer through shifting, interfering layers of dirt and smudges that look as real as anything found in a grotty gas-station restroom.

Both the Garden Sculptures and the Dirty Mirrors turn on carnivalesque inversions of the transitory and the abiding in art. Perishable slices of melon and pizza become as timeless as the Nike of Samothrace in the former, and semi-coherent doodles are emblazoned forever on the latter. This play, at once irreverent and reverent, is at the heart of Matelli’s project. He understands that, as millennia of graffiti on the Coliseum remind us, an anarchic humor must always nip at the heels of the grand or sacrosanct. Yet while he may be happy to throw a rotten, or in his case perfect and artificial, tomato in solidarity with all inspired makers of spontaneous memorials to mischief, Matelli is also a perfectionist devoted to art’s craft and enduring messages. Precisely because art is long and life is short, he devotes himself to capturing the power and exceeding strangeness of both.

– Extract from an essay written by Toby Kamps featured in the exhibition catalogue