Tony Matelli - Masthead Magazine

When I was young I loved the paintings of Hogarth and Bruegel. They seemed like whole complete worlds, alternate realities that you could lose yourself in. I liked looking for every little detail, deciphering the story was a big part of that. Narrative has the power to draw you in and involve you. The paintings also seemed to convey a meaning or a moral which I liked at the time. Mostly I liked the feeling of being sucked up in a work, discovering more and more about a painting the more you looked. Like a complicated story or poem, it enveloped you and made you care about it. There is an emotional investment. I tried other modes of communication during graduate school but ultimately they proved unsatisfactory. There is a seduction naturally embedded in narrative art that I had to return to. Even though today I have moved away from narrative, the fact that I still make representational work sort of includes narrative. I still want people to have an empathic connection with my work. I believe art needs a seductive driving force and if it is to function as anything more than decoration, it needs a subject.

Hyperrealism describes a kind of fetish. The genre itself holds no importance to me at all. It is a somewhat debased tradition at this point. When I started working in that mode my objective was clarity. Using my Weed sculptures as an example; I wanted the sculpture to be as close to the idea as possible. Therefore it needed to be as unmediated as possible, there could be no personal style in work, no “art". Rendering the weed in this mode erased the most amount of "art" from the idea. So for the first moment a viewer is allowed to experience the work as the idea itself, and only after contemplation does the art reveal itself. Then it becomes a philosophical object. In the future if I feel another way of working helps push forward a viewers connection to an idea I'll employ it.