hum:O : Galeria Athena, Rio de Janeiro (2023).

Victor Mattina's paintings are like sphinxes. These fantastic mythological creatures, present in different cultures of antiquity, are usually represented with the body of a lion and a human face and became known especially for the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx. The story goes that the Sphinx challenged all those trying to cross the desert with a riddle to which there was only one right answer. Those who didn't get it right were devoured. Oedipus stood before the Sphinx and managed to get the answer right. Mattina's images work in the same way. The unprecedented set in the exhibition Assim que passou a ver tudo quanto não há reveals the most recent pictorial research by the artist from Rio de Janeiro, who has been investigating issues related to the opacity of the image, its construction, authenticity, reproducibility and authorship through painting since 2010. When you look at the almost ten canvases, they seem to stare back with a single question: "What do you see?".

The title of the show (“As soon as it saw everything that wasn’t” - Athena Gallery, 2023) is a reinterpretation of a passage from the song ‘Gênesis’ by Caetano Veloso. There is an homophony and word play between the verbs "to be" and “to see” in the Portuguese language and here it emphasizes the importance of the gaze in Mattina's research. His starting point is images found or produced using online search engines and artificial intelligence. The artist provides some information, commands or keywords, and the probabilistic model of the AI articulates patterns, recurrences and references to answer the requests. All this information inevitably generates noise, including visual noise, and it is in these nebulous areas that Mattina operates. He, who wanted to be a magician, constructs illusory images, mirages, where we almost always see what we want to see, or what we have the tools to see. These images are often marked by a cold light, like that of electronic device screens and monitors, which dazzle the eye and function almost like mirrors, while at the same time making us believe in the possibility of a certain religiosity or a fantastic/ironic character present there. It's a false aesthetic promise - a promise that the image, including the painted one, always seems to make. It's like a mute gospel.

After looking at these images for some time, the question "What do you see?" seems to almost necessarily lead us to a second question: Why do you see what you see? Victor's paintings construct images that are not exactly what they seem. Never. Unlike Oedipus' Sphinx, there is no right answer here. What there is is an interest in questioning, in doubt, and in getting us to do the exercise of thinking about things that we increasingly take for granted - whether through unshakeable belief, convenience or habit. It reminds me of the late Brazilian artist Tunga (1952-2016), for whom art was the possibility of answering a question with another question. And this is exactly where a certain mythological or religious aspect of Victor Mattina's paintings is striking. Both mythology and religion are born as attempts to talk about the origin - be it of the world, of social norms or even of images. They are tools for orientation on how we could or should look at the world. So this mythological, religious dimension would not occur on the surface, as part of the mere construction of fantastic or ancestral images, but rather as a matter of principle, of operating within the same logic of removing us farther away from reality, so we can better perceive what is right in front of us.

Fernanda Lopes

[-] This series of paintings were exhibited in the solo show "As soon as it saw everything that wasn’t", at Athena Gallery (Rio de Janeiro, RJ) in July 2023, curated by Fernanda Lopes.