Matteo Callegari at Vavassori (2015)

Matteo Callegari’s new paintings investigates separate areas of painting that combine figurative and abstract elements with painterly surfaces structured after digital source material. He overlays, replicates, erases and manipulates found images (from the Quattrocento to monumental funerary sculptures), while formally reducing them to a linear network of imbricated lines and structures. By adopting practices of informational distortion and delination, Callegari negotiates the literal boundaries of possible action while simultaneously limiting them — responding less to the imbrication or layering of different sources than with the homogenizing effects of perception that result from identifying them as interchangeable or simply “information.” Here, the matricies of classical painting (the support, the preparation of the surface, the drawing and painting) reveal to what extent the interchangeable qualities of painting’s topography might symbolically — and materially — reproduce the conditions under which its practice is both investigated and elaborated. In other words, Callegari produces paintings that distort in their making, not just their material but how the material transitions from the objective to unknowable. Or, they are pure surface. Distortion always traffics in images and seeks to reconstitute itself in information.