Visita di cortesia – Giuseppe De Mattia

Banquet is pleased to present “Visita di cortesia”, Giuseppe De Mattia’s first exhibition at the gallery, curated by Enrico Camprini.

As is often the case in the artist’s practice, the exhibition project is configured as a narrative complex in which the individual works participate in the formation of a discourse whose significant tension always oscillates between metaphorical dimension and aesthetic fascination for the object. The artworks, all made for the occasion, are located in a gray zone between different languages with which the artist confronts in an unconventional way – starting with painting, whose ambiguous presence assumes a central role – composing a constellation of functional elements on the one hand, explicitly decorative on the other, which represent the further development of a research on visual and cultural references that is now well-established. Folk traditions, craft knowledge, convivial practices and the ingenuity of reuse, keys to an attitude toward craft that De Mattia has long staged, assume in Visita di cortesia the role of a true critical tool. With the irony typical of the artist’s approach, the works in the exhibition relate to the space at first glance as objects of furniture, transforming the gallery into a merely decorative container. At the same time, they compose the scenic apparatus in which the centerpiece of the project takes shape: a private, exclusive yet popular dinner that took place the night before the opening. Somewhere between a happening and a convivial gathering for a few intimates, it becomes a device through which De Mattia investigates the intertwining of collective rituals and the sociocultural mechanisms underlying the processes of exhibition, artistic production and, more generally, participation in the inevitably contradictory and compromising dynamics that characterize the context in which actors in the art system operate.