MATEO REVILLO

Each piece, through its form and material, establishes a close relationship with space, transforming empty voids into fragments that evoke an imaginary past life.Following this premise, this project constructs an alphabet of cutouts. Most are seemingly basic forms: an arrow, an oval, a triangle, a canvas; while others carry some architectural ambition: modular, expandable. All of these serve as an homage to trompe-l’oeil, a collection of memorabilia from various aspects that, at some point, captured the artist’s attention: the shape his coat forms each time he hangs it on the studio’s entrance coat rack, the ellipse drawn by bull’s eye windows when light enters through their glass, a coat of arms carved in the stone of a building, now devoid of signs due to the passage of time, creating an anonymous inverted triangle.

The forms of the artworks validate their relationship with space and incorporate it into their plots. Invading and appropriating. Wispy lines following a vertical development, like smoke columns, organic yet structured, vibrating around the idea of the straight line. The chosen colors, dark and opaque or vivid and clear, almost hypnotic in effect, also blur the separation between the painting and its environment through contrast, inducing a state of contemplation or suspension.Mateo Revillo explores abstraction through dissolution. Just as the pieces and their lines seem to disintegrate in space, dissolving the barrier between the world and the painting. Simultaneously, this archaeological echo lays the groundwork for a temporal encounter where frescoes coexist with contemporary minimalist reflections on format and ‘in situ.’ It’s a form of abstraction through negation.

An inverted trompe-l’oeil. Painting is not (only) the canvas and its painted surface; painting is looking at the snail as painting, the whole. A way of seeing.Within a meaningful backdrop, Mateo Revillo’s work carries elements of meta painting, discussing space, time, and their surroundings. Weaving a common motif through a number of pieces—three times, in three spatial sets—Mateo Revillo stitches a background to the place. Yet, it’s more of the shadow of a place, between present and absent, fragmentary. The pictorial background, its extension, form, and the inverted trompe-l’oeil of the world upon it, form the foundation of these works. Works in which the viewer takes center stage, upon the ’Fondo’.