Let's Talk About Art, Baby: Matteo Mauro's "EARTH"
Celebrating Some Damn Good Artistry
Hi Everyone,
Coming at you with something a little bit different today.
Admittedly, it’s been a touch slow in our DEAR MOCA submissions, and I’ve wanted for a while to get back to my roots, write more about some actual art. No time like the present. My very first responsibility at MOCA was artistic analysis (I hate the word criticism) for every piece in our Genesis Collection, which then contained 246 pieces. I did just that. You can find all these essays collected on our forum, or you can wait a few months for when we publish (spoilers) all this writing as a limited-run NFT book. I will have details about that for you as soon as I know them myself.
For the next few weeks, however, I thought I’d get back in the ol’ saddle and simply write about some artworks/artists that I’ve come to love: Why they affect me, why I think they’re important, why I think they’re worth your attention.
Up first: Matteo Mauro’s piece EARTH, which I learned about too late, after it had already found a home in our humble Museum’s own Genesis Collection. I have found myself thinking of this piece often, which is exactly why I wanted to write about it. I rarely find myself as fascinated by generative art as I am by Mauro’s work. There’s some…thing about it that just grabs me. So today, I tried to figure out just what that thing is. You’ll have to let me know how I did.
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, on our Twitter, or in my own DMs.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
Xoxo,
CohentheWriter.
Up first?
Artist: Matteo Mauro
Artwork: EARTH
Source Link: https://superrare.com/0xb11c2e413379a41e6cbaa5059780cb9717fc6e16/EARTH-5
Date Minted: September 22, 2022
Artist Description: M. Mauro (b.1992), Four Elements. EARTH – Minted: Spring 2022. Non-fungible Token ERC-721. PNG 4444 x 4444 px (ed. 1/1) Generative Art. ✦ The Four Elements series is a section of the artistic project entitled Micromegalic Inscriptions. The ongoing research process of a peculiar and identifiable creative language of Matteo Mauro Studio stops among the folds of the four natural elements: Air, Water, Fire and EARTH. These deep forces foresee the creations of the series in motion. In a continuous and hypnotic stream, controlled lines run along the digital canvas. Matteo Mauro continues this hermeneutical journey with an evolution in the technological sense. His drawing language insinuates and transforms; it implements a process of abundant abstraction, made of infinite linear variations and contortions that multiply the force of traditional inscriptions for a magnetic result.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Matteo Mauro, man, what a stunning skillset. It’s not just that Mauro has achieved an abstract style uniquely his. Which he has. And it’s not just that Mauro understands his abstract style so comprehensively that he can use it to play with multiple perspectives. Which he does. It’s that this so completely-conceived abstraction is so competently understood from so many perspectives at once, and Mauro’s finished products are as fiendishly layered in reality as they are undoubtedly in his head.
EARTH, the piece before us today, is a precise and powerful exhibition of perspective, as is the series —“Four Elements” which contains Water, Fire, and Air as well— to which it belongs. I find myself automatically approaching EARTH as from a head-on perspective, like it’s the surface of an acid-addled wallpaper, but also feeling compelled to see it from the top-down, a topographical map, though one less of a place and more of a concept. It seems to evoke both internal and external worlds; EARTH is as intestinal as it is terrestrial. It is a maddeningly complex journey into the heart of something nameless, but a journey begun from multiple simultaneous starting points. You can look at it for hours, memorize its every contour, set it aside, come back the next day, and find the artwork itself seeming to have morphed, reformatted itself, still as coy as it was from first glance, and yet offering, to the discerning onlooker, another new way into itself.
Generative art remains, for me, the most difficult kind of artistry to actually qualify. I first hit upon this difficulty when discussing the work of Espen Kluge some years ago. Because we simply can’t know which decisions in a given piece were specifically made by the artist. Shapes, textures, colors, and sometimes entire narratives may emerge via unknown —if expertly manipulated— processes. The artist is not always present. Sometimes they appear absent altogether. Generative art feels like an exaggerated embodiment of why, I believe, so many laypeople scorn the digital art world at-large: Unlike an Impressionist masterpiece where every brushstroke communicates skill, the human touch is often hidden behind computer programs.
A new burden is thus placed on the generative artist: She must somehow reveal her presence within a landscape that she has not herself touched.
Does Mauro do as much? Let’s see. There is in EARTH something textural which feels unique. There is something grand in its defiant denial of single perspective analysis. There is, of course, its seamlessly blended color, and its complexity, and its highly-insinuative arrangement of line. But EARTH is also not entirely unique in Mauro’s own oeuvre. Much of Mauro’s generative artistry, beyond just the other pieces in the “Four Elements” series, borrows from EARTH’s elegant, feathery composition and expressionist interweaving of color. Many of his NiftyGateway works, for instance, could be slotted in where EARTH sits, be affixed with a new title, and fit both aesthetically and thematically.
And so question I once again have trouble answering is: Why is EARTH as special as it appears to be?
Let’s let the canvas itself guide us.
That canvas is a maelstrom of flitting, feathery lines. They branch out from main arteries, snaking unpredictably, their colors morphing gently from eggshell white to mahogany to the same deep blues used to denote undersea trenches on marine maps. The feathers themselves exist in a middle-state of being, neither forming into themselves nor coming apart. Rather they are doing both. Movement is strongly implied by their curves and wisps. Absent the title, we might believe ourselves looking at kitten fur or a shag carpet as seen under an electron microscope. We might be looking at Photoshopped hair clippings arranged just so upon a dark background, drizzled over with iodized dyes. We can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in on EARTH and yet never find its resolution lessening or its depth become shallow. The resolution itself, the sheer depth with which Mauro’s technical brilliance lets us plumb, ensures us we are in the hands of a master. Owing to this technical expertise, EARTH springs out at us, it draws us in. EARTH greets us from above and below and as if hung before us on a vertical wall. It is not only disinterested in singleness, it is fiendishly antagonistic to it.
And while abstraction is its own practice, I think Mauro’s work is better described as multiplicity. Like a holographic image which shines in multiple colors at once, like a superpositioned electron, EARTH is multiple things, often contradictory, at the same time. This must have required careful calculation and precise execution on Mauro’s part. To make EARTH so airy, light, weightless; the easiest of implied breezes would sway each feather into a different position. Yet there is a terrestrial heaviness here; one cannot easily move a mountain range, come torrent or typhoon or what-have-you. Despite the predominance of white and light oranges in the composition, EARTH feels like a dark and moody and cerebral artwork.
Mauro does not so much as show us a spectrum of experience, but situates the composition at two extremes, the spectrum between them thus implied in every dichotomy. The term “earth” is itself evocative of multitudes: To leap face first into the soft pillow of dune sand, or to fly off a skateboard and onto concrete, “earth” implies both. Canyons and peaks. Boulders and dust. Mountains and mud. Being both at once, that requires expansive breadth and it requires pinpoint composition. Mauro manages both. Apply any adjective you like onto this artwork, and it is likely accurate. But so is its antipode! To see one thing in EARTH is to see its evil twin. What Mauro does not show us, what he forces us to conceptualize ourselves, is every miniscule evolutionary step between the one and the other. We are thus in thrall to his wizardry, we are obliged to participate in the creation of each new spectrum..
And in that, I think, the artist is revealed, the artwork confirmed as mastery.
Next week’s artist? The inimitable Panter Xhita. Excited as all hell for that one.