Nuova Galleria Morone presents a solo exhibition by Mathew McWilliams (Vancouver, Canada, 1973), curated by Roberto Lacarbonara, entitled “Things As They Are,” a unique dialogue with the work Concerto a quattro figure (1608-1610) by Baroque painter Antiveduto Gramatica (Rome, 1571-1626).
Mathew McWilliams’ artistic research is characterized by a profound processual and analytical reflection on painting. It is a self-reflective, metalinguistic investigation in which the artist questions the primary components of aesthetic experience, from the formal and compositional aspects of painting to the perceptual and sensory aspects of seeing.
On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the Nuova Galleria Morone, the Paris based Canadian artist – a keen connoisseur of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, with a particular affinity for the Sienese matrix of Tuscan primitivism – literally works on the work of Antiveduto Gramatica, with a process that combines spatial and formal analysis with chromatic and tonal analysis, without however neglecting the profound ‘sentimental’, emotional and narrative quality of 17th-century painting.
The dialogue undertaken with Gramatica’s Concerto a quattro figure (1608-1610) takes on the characteristics of a structural study of space and pictorial composition, aimed at intercepting the tensions and relationships within the painting, both overt and latent. McWilliams identifies the lines of construction of the painting (perspectives, gestures, objects, gazes) and then selects a single line with which to divide the surface of his canvas into two parts. Using an “extra-pictorial” color (a calibrated mixture of CMYK inkjet inks), the artist paints the two previously identified areas on two canvases of the same size. In this way, the two new surfaces appear to complement each other. He then photographs the two canvases and, using a drum printer, prints the photographic image of the first onto the second and vice versa, transferring the reproduction of one onto the other.
The ‘original’ support thus receives the image of the other subject, creating an indissoluble link between two units that contain each other’s memory.
Working with lines and backgrounds, but also incorporating photography, printing, and inkjet colors, McWilliams multiplies and intertwines linguistic registers, techniques, and media. By making the medium (the canvas) the subject of the photographic image, he blocks the process of seriality in photography. Furthermore, by translating the seventeenth-century pictorial experience into our more ordinary and recurrent enjoyment of the image, McWilliams analyzes the forms of mediation and mediatization of vision, exploring its expressive, linguistic, and compositional possibilities.
This research moves backwards from the decomposition of Baroque art to discuss our trust in what we consider original or copy or manipulation, and to investigate the relationship between an object and its image, between an experience and its narrative. It goes so far as to question and understand the deep fabric of reality, its structures and forces: things as they are.