Public Gallery hosts Matteo Cordero's first solo exhibition

Public Gallery is proud to host the first solo exhibition of Italian artist Matteo Cordero. The exhibition will be on show until 2nd February at Hackney Downs Studios.

For his debut solo exhibition, Cordero continues his interest in the narrative potential of art; presenting a new series of paintings that explore the continuum of past and present, seeking to capture the essence of experience rather than to document it in all its details.

Visual art has always been closely associated with storytelling and Cordero’s practice simultaneously engages narrative while presenting images in a non-narrative form. Influenced by the Neo-Expressionists of the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly the Italian Transavanguardia movement, Cordero aims to return to the traditional act of painting; one that elicits emotion and meaning through intensity of process, image and narrative. However, his work takes shape as a series of loosely connected episodes, linked through ambiguous themes and images but highly individual in themselves.

In this new series Cordero chooses to ground his imagery in metaphor. Concerned with ritual and myth, as well as the essence of experience; he creates haunted landscapes punctuated by everyday objects as well as strange primitive half-human, half-animal beings that are either hunter or hunted, victor or victim. These forms are rendered simply and economically, the colour is intense and mark making bold and direct. There is almost no sense of illusionistic space, rather shifts of scale are as schematic as the figures. Cordero uses colour and texture to underscore the immediacy of the experience, all of which acts as a conveyor of mood.