With Fantasmagorie, Matteo Cremonesi explores a semantic territory characterized by the presence of a series of heterogeneous works, paintings, and sculptures, made with different materials. A collection of objects, artifacts, and images, through which the author animates a universe of signs stretched between the expression of a mediation between contemporary languages and imaginaries and the return of signs, narratives, and compositional practices linked to the ancestral universe.
A questioning about survival and the dark return of impressions, stories, and symbols, and their ability to be grafted into contemporary fabric.
As suggested by the title of the exhibition itself, Cremonesi’s work insinuates itself into an uncertain territory of apparitions and specters, where the echo of a peculiar pictorial tradition encounters the crossing of literary and cinematographic imaginaries characterized by a violent and distorting confrontation with modernity and its demands.
A Ballardian process in which the coexistence of material and imaginary elements gives rise to an archaeology of the present, through sculptures made by assembling discarded elements and bones found during excursions, a collection of blackened ceramic heads, casts of a silicone mask of Donald Trump used during the electoral campaign by his supporters, as well as through paintings that combine digitally printed images with a traditional painting behavior. This delineates a veritable environment in which each present element keeps on reworking the echo of the previous work.
The exhibition is accompanied by texts by Mauro Folci and Bruno Muzzolini.
Matteo Cremonesi, (1986) lives and works between Milan and Trentino Alto Adige. Through different linguistic approaches, his work investigates the relationship between contemporary imagery and the narratives of an ancestral heritage. An interrogation of the survival and return of images, stories, symbols and narratives.
His works have been exhibited in galleries and exhibition spaces in Italy and abroad, including: Nighttimestory (Los Angeles); Museo Santa Maria della Scala (Siena); Bleschunov Municipal Museum, (Odessa); Festival Internacional de Artes Gráficas (São Paulo); Miheličeva Gallery, 15th Festival Art Stays- Ptuj, (Slovenien); Book signing published at Offprint London and Photo London – Tate Modern, Bankside, (London); Docva, Fondazione Hangar Bicocca (Milan); Family Business (New York); The Orange (Seoul); Museum of Art (Tel Aviv), Jarach Gallery (Venice), Gallleriapiù (Bologna).
He is professor at NABA, and Deputy Director of the international research platform PHROOM.