MATTIA SARTI – MAINSTREAM
From 24 April to 18 May 2024
Inauguration: Wednesday 24 April 2024 7.00pm – 9.30pm
Candy Snake Gallery
Candy Snake Gallery presents Mainstream, a solo exhibition by Mattia Sarti, born in 1988 in Zevio (Verona), lives and works in Rome.
Depicting a distorted and imperfect reality, Mattia Sarti explores and celebrates the complex beauty of life in the modern world. In his works the artist reflects and redefines the icons of the contemporary imagination, revealing how everyday life is continually altered and bent according to personal needs and visions.
Mainstream is configured as a journey through the complexity of human existence, where boundaries blur and identities are transformed. In a world where the border between real and artificial becomes increasingly thin, Sarti's works distill the essence of contemporary life through deformed lenses and altered perceptions.
The paintings on display reproduce in painting the extremes of the "liquify" tool, an effect used in photo editing programs and in the filters present in photography applications to smooth and perfect images, which here becomes a means to exasperate and deform the tribal icons of society modern, symbols that inhabit our collective imagination, transformed and reinterpreted to challenge our perception of normality. Reality is thus broken down and recomposed in new and unexpected forms, exploring the expressive potential of deformation and at the same time opening reflections on how technology can be claimed as a tool of cultural criticism and investigation.
Fluidity, understood both in terms of identity and perception of reality, is also investigated through the personal experience of the artist, who draws from his own personal experiences to explore the mutability of reality and its susceptibility to deformations. The pictorial space becomes a terrain of confrontation between the self and the external world, between the intimate and the collective.
The visual hallucinations experienced by the artist during adolescence, lived in a province far from the nerve centers of contemporary culture, become a source of inspiration for a pictorial series that stimulates reflections on the mutability of the perception of a reality constantly shaped by internal experiences and surrounding environment.
In Mattia Sarti's works the familiar elements of our existence are stretched, distorted and reshaped as if they had gone through a washing cycle at too high a temperature. Distorted visions that push us to recognize and appreciate the beauty inherent in transience and transformation, showing us that art, just like life, can be surprisingly fun, deeply ironic and delightfully unpredictable.
