OSPITE / MATIAS ERCOLE

curated by Guillaume Maitre y Paulo Pérez Mouriz
text Benedetta Casini
8 May - 31 May 2024
Spazio Nuovo, Via d'Ascanio 20 - Roma - Italia

Spazio Nuovo is pleased to present Ospite, a new exhibition by artist Matías Ercole (Buenos Aires; 1987) in Rome. This site-specific project offers viewers the opportunity to explore Ercole’s artistic vision, which brings together scratched works in ink and wax on canvas paper in dialogue with the architecture of the room itself.

In his most recent works, the artist focuses on the analysis of light as the core of his conceptual system: the works
reflect the experience of dystopian and surreal geographies through the intricate exploration of the identity, body and
iconographic aspects of light itself.

"The semantic meaning of the word 'guest' condenses the dual action of receiving and offering hospitality: it is on this two-way movement that Matias Ercole reflects in his second Roman debut. For over two years, the
Argentinean artist has considered himself a "guest" in Italy, a context undoubtedly characterised by a tenacious adherence to his own identity references. In the light of this premise, the proliferation of doors, portals, passageways, dark or luminous rectangles on the surface of the canvases in the exhibition alludes to a possible meeting point between cultures that in the artist's autobiography have found themselves coexisting. Through decomposition and analytical montage, Ercole relates distant iconographic references, incorporating and proposing suggestions."
text of Benedetta Casini