Salvatore Matteo
SalvoARTS.com
'Get the populace scared enough, and you get away with anything.' Fear yanks away your basic civil liberties, your intuition, your sense of dignity and humane behavior."
Mark Morford, SFGate.com Columnist, 02/13/04Wracked with distress since 2001 when world events unraveled in his native New York, Matteo took razor to paper. What he could not find around him, he imparted for others in his graceful, fluid, kinetic forms-forms that relinquish fear to forge acceptance and insight.
Forsaking defense-industry contracts to pursue art full-time, Matteo's works are described as "architectural"-an ironic expression of artistic talents he employed for mass-destruction projects such as the MX Missile and the "Big Eye" chemical bomb over a decade ago.
Using the elemental medium of paper, Matteo structures fluid, pure-white sculptures that serve as Mandalas-religious and Eastern designs symbolic of a universe in harmony-for a culture needing balance, alignment and enlightenment.
To Matteo, both universal and individual consciousness is aligned in a sacred symmetry of circle and square archetypes. The circle represents our right-brain, circuitous human emotion, the square our left-brain, linear logic. Obsession with one or the other incites agendas and lies that ripple out from Self to Society, individual dissatisfaction to cultural discord and, ultimately, war.
These abstract renderings call us to balance-to embrace circle and square, yin and yang, dark and light. Only there-at the center of some universal continuum-can we compassionately perceive both sides of consciousness. Only there can we find an equilibrium that intuitively tempers logic and emotion for the greater good of social harmony.
Still, Matteo lives beside us, coping with modern life's pace and pains. Injustice and violence are therefore subtly incorporated into his pieces as barbwires, razors and taut springs-his souvenirs of the daily threats of sex and violence that barrage us in media news and images.
Coupled with natural or artificial lighting, his sculptures call us to stop and regard, to sit and absorb his work while time, light and shadow wash over them. In so doing, light transforms not only his Counter Balance but also the light by which we see our society.
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