Matteo Callegari

This publication explores the painting practice of New York-based Italian artist Matteo Callegari. Organized in sections according to the artist’s bodies of works, the volume digs into Callegari’s constellation of references — from ancient funerary sculpture to Renaissance painting — and re-articulates these materials according to the artist’s strategies of image-making. Design studio Front Desk Apparatus imitates Callegari’s painting practices of distortion and delineation, in order to freeze the moment in which the images’ semantic value deteriorates. Callegari’s paintings appear in these pages as corrupted data, information bugs, while at the same time fighting for their own iconicity. Embodying the very process of the artworks’s making, this book can be read as the platform of Callegari’s “painting system”.