Gallery Two, Chicago
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo show with Simone Mantellassi, Carpeting In the Kitchen Incorperated. Mantellassi’s paintings on paper and sculptural tableaus poke fun at the tragicomedy life, tackling subjects ranging from two former American presidents, Captain Ahab, Ronald McDonald and the axis of evil, to the ancient superheroes of Ellenic Greece and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Inspired by a trove of artists and filmmakers including David Lynch, Alejandro Jorodowsky, Josephine Halvorson, and Philip Guston, Mantellassi works in an aesthetic fully his own; mixing comic book storytelling, surrealism and formalism into a distinct visual language. The show opens in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions in Chicago on September 12 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm. and runs through November 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
His works on paper echo the multi-perspective quality of comic book pages and surrealist art as overlapping storylines and viewpoints cohabitate in one plane. Nonsensical alignments of objects and narratives intermingle with a humorous, dreamy color palette, often paired with poetically off-kilter titles in his second language, English. Pastries (real and fake), trees, pipes, body parts, treehouses, scenes from the kitchen, shoes and trash from the woods all expand and contract between resolution and dissolution, animating a dreamlike quality where highly vivid thoughts remain incomplete and half-formed.
From certain drawings, Mantellassi creates three-dimensional sculptures—compact, diorama-like compositions composed of everyday materials in plexiglas casing. The humor and irony of his work is made concretely manifest in these objects, whose crumply, crude surfaces and “imperfect” finishes are precisely where the work culminates most fully; stage-sets for the tragicomedy of life where narrative and its artifice are on display simultaneously.
In The Status Of Things As They Have Been an irregularly contoured rectangular slab of pink styrofoam leans back in a clear plastic vitrine, with white overalls painted on it, a torso shape as a stand in for the artist, perhaps. The title of the work is painted cartoonishly on each side of the slab, with quirky sculptures made from commonplace materials inhabit the space. On the back of the vitrine the Mantellassi scrawled on a painted banner “I DIDN’T LIKED RONALD REAGAN THE FIRST TIME AROUND ANYWAY” as a discrete viewer gazes up at it from the bottom right of the plane.
A similar pink slab forms the central image in the work on paper Ronald McDonald And The Axis of Evil On Frakt Boulevard P.M. Instead of being adorned by overalls, this shape serves as the ground for a tumbling tableau of Guston-like forms: boots, human faces, headstones, beer cans, trees hiding fat pixies in their leaf clouds, street signs and hats, punctuated by a head of a pink man at the bottom of the page exclaiming in a comic book balloon “FUCK! IT’S THE AXIS OF EVIL.” We are particularly enamored with another sculpture in vitrine titled “Piece of Skin From My Forehead Enlarged Quite A Bit.” Descriptions defy it, you’ll have to see it in person.
A self-taught artist, born and raised in Florence, Italy in 1971, Simone Mantellassi moved to the United States in 2002 and lives and works in Gilbertsville, New York, in the Western Catskills. His work has been shown at and is in the collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Other exhibitions include the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, Buller Space in New York, NADA New York and KIPNZ in Walton, NY.