Matteo makes realist canvasses. Most people or wowed by the colours and mixed compositions he takes from advertising, snapshots: the glamourous and glamourless; the art of being teenage, being bored, being lost, being useless. The girls and sexualised boys, he makes fetishes using their iconography, he's aware of the power of their nudity and wields it casually: waxy chests and crash helmets, motorbike gauntlets and low quality fancy dress costumes - a chicken mask or friendly chipmunk's head.
Matteo is aware that this cheapness talks of lost nights at parties, 3am in a sweat-haze, flashed images of suburban buzz-headed boys swigging a brahma, a full-body bear costume and a miniskirt on his knee; talks of removed gay sex, mediated by a furry suit, reflecting childhood cartoons and first sexual stirrings and Jessica Rabbit as their archetype: a hyperreal simulacrum of an assemblage of a century's history of young bucks' fantasies and diversions in animation studios and Madison Avenue, backroom boys with pipes and bawdy jokes in fifties suits; talks of the semi-mythical American filmic trope of the kid in the chicken-suit handing out fliers for a lube shop for six bucks an hour; talks of the children of America's cultural diaspora, of not knowing these archetypes first-hand, working with the stereotypes and the taste you get recreating them, first on film, then exacted on canvas with the gloss of Rosenquist.
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