In City of Apparitions, Matthew Picton will debut six new three-dimensional framed hand cut paper sculptural assemblages that continue his fascinating ability to magnify - conceptually and technically - the slippery intersections of history, religion, culture and art. If art is the cousin of scholarship, Picton is his own distinct brand of scholar.
Here, Federico Fellini takes center stage as Picton’s subject, in particular his films Roma and Satyricon, both of which assume the city of Rome as the filmmaker’s signature backdrop and principle protagonist. Fellini’s imprint upon contemporary Rome and his sly interpretation of its history informs this stunning suite of Picton’s latest sculptural assemblages. This artist’s revisitation of the Vatican and the ancient empire through the lens of this great artist is in itself a kind of collaboration; a postmodern recollection of history.
In this Fellini inspired series, work is summoned on a glorious scale, which is vibrant in color, and complex in composition; a veritable “carnival” for the eyes. Through his meticulous process of research, cutting up and rearranging architectural drawings and related advertisements in a quilt-like process, adjacent to a cubist approach. His works have the feel of bas-relief, an almost topological experience. An image object. They are comprised of real and imagined renderings borrowed from printed images which are painstakingly excised from historical documents then reconstructed into a fractured, new visual narrative. Faces of the past float amongst the compositions. In the reflection of their frames you can see your own, incidentally becoming a three-way collaboration; a “mirror” of Classical antiquity, no better expressed than in his epic work entitled Rome, the penultimate confluence of histories, past and present.
Picton is known for his increasingly complex, multi-dimensional, sculptural map cut-outs, and this series expands beyond the cartographic element. The artist continues to create rich visual narratives, and his extraordinarily dynamic sculptural creations collapse historical timelines through carefully constructed layers of paper and vellum.
