Tony Matelli: Timelines

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.