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4/5/2005

Gabriele Di Matteo

Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier

Le peintre salue la mer. A pictorial installation

It is made up of several hundred commercial paintings, one half of them depicting "mimosas", the other "waves". The clash between these different genre paintings (still lifes with a vertical format and landscapes with a horizontal format) takes place on the FRAC exhibition walls, here offering the display of a tension.

The essential "commercial painting" in Di Matteo's art actually helps him to raise the issue of the survival of painting in the age of artistic democratization, and play with the component categories of its distribution and its appropriation by "looks" which are not regarded as "authorized" from the viewpoint of the institution and the art world. For him, therefore, what is involved is the pinpointing of a popular dimension of artistic activity, where commercial painting seems to him to be one of the possible modes of expression.

To do this, Gabriele Di Matteo will also screen a film made near Naples about a religious festival dedicated to the Madonna de l'Arco, at the entrance to the FRAC stacks. This film shows commercial painters competing to win the best painting prize, for the painting rewarded for paying tribute to the Madonna! The artist thus analyses the common desire to be a recognized, famous artist, as well as the ridiculous postures to which this leads. But through the mechanization of this commercial production, he also reactivates the avant-garde utopia of an art "for one and all", which will no longer rely on the rigid structures of institutions, but will in its own way participate in community festivities. The Gabriele Di Matteo show at the FRAC attests to an acute awareness of the clash between these two viewpoints on art--viewpoints often regarded as unreconcilable. But are they really?

Frac Languedoc-Roussillon
4 rue Rambaud - Montpellier

stampa

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