“Ex Post Facto” is Matthew Antezzo’s sixth exhibition at the gallery. However, ten years have passed since the fifth exhibition…the artist has therefore devised an exhibition that is retrospective, retroactive; that looks back ex post facto over a decade of work. Matthew Antezzo is an American artist who was born in Connecticut in 1962. He appropriates photographs from 1970’s contemporary art magazines, images from well- known films and more recently pictures found on the internet and he methodically reproduces them, along with the original caption, in black and white on large-scale canvases.
These clichéd images, of, for instance, celebrated conceptual artists or famous performers, as well as inventors of technical innovations, which are reproduced on the artist’s canvas, refer to a personal cultural memory, but also more broadly to a collective unconscious penetrated by the influential power of the mass media.
Through his artistic practice, Matthew Antezzo revives images, sometimes several decades after they were first published. The choice of medium – painting – assures not only a certain authenticity, but also, above all, uniqueness.
By selecting and accumulating these images Matthew Antezzo creates a personal archive that arouses nostalgia in the viewer, and also prompts questioning – not only about the politics of production and consummation of images but also about authorship and the legitimacy of the works.