Anthony Mastromatteo Still-life Paintings

"Tipping Pointe" is a trompe l'oeil still life oil painting of a number 2 pencil & ballet dancer balancing objects. Mastromatteo started this painting with a pencil improbably bala...

Every Mastromatteo painting is riddled with meaning and double meaning. Notice every number in the deck of cards is present except for the number eight. and the Joker. However, there...

"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...

"Being and Nothingness" is a 2023 trompe l'oeil modernist oil painting. Mastromatteo pays homage to Malevich’s black square, and even positions it at the top left quarter of the canvas. The modernist symbol is austere, and formidable, yet it lays flat on the two-dimensional plane. Outside the square, amidst a wall of white, are little butterflies. Their angled wings...

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...

Framed Dimensions: 13.5 x 13.5 inches

"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...

"The Three Body Problem" is a pink comic book trompe l'oeil of a famous physics phenomenon. Mastromatteo creates a meditation on the "Three Body Pr...

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 ...

Mastromatteo creates a trompe l'oeil painting of a page from a comic book taped onto a bright blue wall. Batman seems to burst off the page, while the page is literally peeling off t...