59 1/8 x 59 1/8 in
The China Made in Italy project, by Gabriele Di Matteo comes from the awareness that patenting a single pictorial style is almost impossible such as it is impossible to apply claims related to copyrights to any artistic imaginary. Since the beginning of his artistic career, Di Matteo has always questioned how the active presence of the author during the painting process should have a role strongly tied to the manual exercise of the pictorial practice itself. Today with China Made in Italy he tries a piratical “boarding” at the expenses of the new pictorial Chinese wave. The million worth paintings by Ma Liuming, Zhang Xiaogang, Yang Shaobin, Zhou Tiehai, only to quote some of the most notorious ones, reflect the booming Chinese economy and its primacies. Gabriele Di Matteoʼs project enters in this reality to create a short circuit and thus introduces a destabilizing element: the author has selected one hundred of the most significant and famous works of the contemporary Chinese art to reproduce them. The copies faithfully reproduced in their original size show their nature of fake ones: they are repainted in black and white. Depriving the copies of their colours, the artist places a distance from them yet developing a logic of repetition by which, apart from exploring the significant potential of painting, he sets up a direct dialogue with the ephemeral and perverse rules of the art market. These works hardly definable neither as copies nor as a postmodern appropriation, set a series of reflections on the power and autonomy of the originality beside the persuasive force of art. Another not secondary aspect, underlines the falseness of the reproductions: they do not obey to any economical logic that determines the price, mainly based on the artistʼs personal quotations, but, nevertheless their dimensions, they have the same price.
The entire series of works will deliberately be showed referring mainly to the serial production: the paintings will not be hung on the wall but put one against the other so that visitors will be free to touch and pull them out and look at them. All the entire installation will remember the interior of one of the many warehouses, containing counterfeit goods, scattered all over the world.
