Mataro Da Vergato : New Painting

The result of an artistic journey that began in New York in 1990, my work is visually and conceptually inspired to the ideals of Renaissance art and it uses, just like Renaissance artists did centuries ago, the most advanced technologies available. While I conceive and study a new work according to the parameters of traditional painting, I carry it out starting from a photographic base (most often black and white) and then color it and transform it with a computer, in the ambitious intent of transmitting to viewers the same aesthetic and artistic fascination of classical painting and antique pictures. In my work, photography constitutes a pattern of light depicting reality, and the computer constitutes a modern color palette. With them I continue the creative and artistic journey begun in the 1400s by Flemish painters, who were by chance associated to the guild of opticians. Being in close contact with the latest discoveries in optics, these artists started reproducing reality and human nature with the newborn technique of oil painting (which they invented), studying them through what were cutting-edge technical instruments of the time, such as lenses and mirrors, which later became the building blocks of the photographic camera. While these artists imitated reality through painting, I begin with the reality of the photographic shot and, manipulating it through a computer, I return to painting, ideally closing the circle. My work is apparently an imitation of classical painting but is in fact devoid of its matter, being made up simply of numbers and pixels – one could say that it develops the pictorial aspect of traditional photography. In the choice of subjects and themes as well, over these twenty-six years I’ve tried to depict the bare and often blunt aspect of reality, transfiguring it and making it epic and dramatic in the eternity of myth, uniting sacred and profane, Eros and Thanatos. My aim is to blend past and future without stopping at the purely “documentational” photographic shot, or at the purely “romantic” gesture of the brush on the canvas, to give life to a new artistic form: Digital Painting.