Gabriele Di Matteo
Reflecting Velazquez, 2010
Oil on canvas
318 x 276 cm
“Reflecting Velazquez” (“Riflettere Velazquez”) is a copy of Velazquez's major work on a 1:1 scale (318 x 276 cm), but this is black and white and flipped over version, as “reflected” in a mirror. Gabriele Di Matteo’s work speaks about the meaning of 'copy', 'multiple', and the problem of authorship and authenticity.
Di Matteo reflects about the power and autonomy of the image and the persuasive force of art, still linked to the romantic myth. The utopian fascination resides in the attempt of reproducing it mechanically; the artist who repaints these canvases can only do so imperfectly, in full awareness of the impossibility of producing an identical copy.
In this mirror the painted work confronts the canvas that is being painted and all the characters play their roles directly confronting the many figures that observe the observer. The 'velazquian' mirror in a certain sense precedes the work of Di Matteo and the concept of re-figuration itself. In this work, which is a flipped reflection of the original, we see the real couple in the same way and angle as Velazquez was looking at them, thus creating the overlapping effect of a mirror of the mirror.
At the same time, this is also a work on photography, the election of the black and white for this copy is due not so much to the fact that it is a copy, but that it is a copy of a photographic reproduction.
