MATTEO BERNASCONI
works on display at Peach Black Gallery
bio
Matteo Bernasconi is a Sydney-based portrait and figurative artist. His work has been primarily exhibited in Italy, Spain, and Australia, and is held in private collections all over the world.
Bernasconi has been a finalist in several major art awards including the Kilgour Prize, The Shirley, the Percival and the Mosman Art Prize.
Bernasconi’s painterly, sensual works take inspiration from the human condition, offering moments of reflection on feelings, thoughts, and ideas that are normally brushed off in everyday life or deemed taboo. Interested in the range and extremes of emotion, Bernasconi also draws on the thinking of great philosophers and artists like Schopenhauer,  Friedrich Nietzsche, and Franz Kafka.
Bernasconi’s  recent solo exhibition, The Cure, explored the importance of human connection and the far-reaching impacts that the pandemic
had on our relationships and communities.
Poised between stillness and movement, serenity, and dynamism, Bernasconi’s works are exquisite visual provocations, posing questions to the viewer about the human condition.
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latest seriesEvocante
Evocante is a collection of paintings that seek to capture a sense of energy, of something wordless and primal.
Through this revision, these historical paintings move from a world of physical suffering into one of spirit. The pieces are suffused with a dreamy, mysterious quality that offers the viewer little in the way of easy answers or simply parsed meaning.
Some of the works are left intentionally unfinished, inviting the viewer to find their own way into a particular painting, to situate themselves in relation to a work that is personal and born of the moment. By choosing to leave some works incomplete, the viewer is also moved to reflect on the process of creation, to attend carefully to the textures, shapes, and lines of any one piece.
Evocante includes interpretations of iconic works such as The Raft of the Medusa. Rendered in a distinctly contemporary mode, the accumulated grandeur bestowed on these masterpieces through the years are stripped back to reveal the emotion and humanity that has sustained their justly earnt reputations.
Created in layers of transparent washes and bearing translucent forms, the paintings in Evocante move between the real and the otherworldly, the figural and the abstract. The paintings suggest but never impose, offering up moments of reflection and deep immersion.
Evocante is an invitation to feel.
