Board Still-life Paintings

"Hello, My Name Is" is a trompe l'oeil oil painting of nametags and sharpie on blue background. Anthony Mastromatteo reintroduces himself in his first exhibition with the Grenning ...

"A City Upon a Hill" is a trompe l'oeil oil painting of comic clipping taped on a grey wall. Framed Dimensions: 19 x 25 inches The arts have been an integral part of Anthony Mas...

Is NOT is a present day vanitas still life. A meditation on the ephemerality of life and the things we hold dear. The fragility of the statement "time is not money" is represented in...

"Lovely Mary Jane" is a Post-Modern painting inspired by The Bluest Eye by Toni Morison. Lovely Mary Jane is a candy wrapper, taped to a blue wall. It’s trash, glorified. But this is not a political statement about commercialism or recycling. This painting was inspired by one of the top 10 banned books across the country, Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” which is about a young black girl who wishes she had blue eyes, an envy shaped from her love of her favorite candy, Mary Jane. It’s a heartbreaking notion caused by an ideal of beauty perpetuated by a marketing campaign for a sweet treat. Classical painting also hails a certain ideal of beauty… and one wouldn’t usually find something as insignificant as a candy wrapper as the focal point of their pièce de résistance. However, Mastromatteo is asking us to see that here is power in idealization, especially in something so seemingly throwaway. He’s prodding us to be more aware…to make people aware of the significance of the seemingly insignificant. The one power an artist possesses is that of forcing the viewer to look at something of his choosing…and in this case he’s asking us to look at something that may be garbage. Consider Maurizio Cattelan, whom in 2019 taped a banana to the wall with duct tape, and it later sold for $120,000…art forces the viewer to consider something that everyone is telling you to look at. Mastromatteo’s candy wrapper is taped up to the wall in a similar fashion as Cattelan’s banana…if we look long enough at the tape, we’ll notice it’s resemblance to the “not-equal” sign...

Anthony Mastromatteo depicts a stopwatch, with the hands either falling off or holding up the watch—depending on how you see it. He depicts his sense that time is non-linear and can ...