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Francesca DiMattio Bed 2008

Francesca DiMattio uses a flurry of detail (an all-out horror vacui) to flatten out her compositions and confound her viewers’ sense of depth while she uses architectural motifs as a means to structure and exaggerate instances of deep perspectival recession. This paradoxical approach to painterly space results in a heightened tension between foreground and background, between pictorial illusion and the reality of the surface of the canvas, and between two disparate kinds of seeing––the expansive vista on the one hand and the scrutinizing, concentrated gaze on the other. In Untitled (Bed I), a parquet floor, an off-kilter staircase, and a complex, mosaic-like grid of tile work together to create the dizzying illusion of infinite spatial recession, just as a slew of highly eclectic anecdotes (a bed, an umbrella, an eagle, a deer’s head) combine with expressive, gestural mark-making to create a sense of flatness and all-over abstraction. As in classic surrealist images, here quotidian objects are rendered realistically but are illogically sized and incongruously contextualized and embedded against the background, which in turn seems to undulate and come alive. The result is an attenuated dreaminess, an image that is heavy with visual incident while bearing a sense of weightlessness and vertigo.
Identification
Title
Bed
Production Date
2008
Object Number
2008.5
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM’s Collectors Council
Copyright
© Francesca DiMattio. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
112 x 72 inches
Visual Description
“Untitled (Bed I) is an acrylic painting on canvas. It measures seven and a half feet tall by four feet wide. The painting stands vertically, meaning that its shortest side runs parallel to the ground. This expressive, gestural painting contains a surrealist depiction of a bedroom. At the painting’s focal point, there is a white wire gridded chair. It sits at half of the painting’s height just off centered to the right, facing away from the viewer towards the left. The chair faces an empty white bed frame that is facing towards the viewer. The headboard consists of an arch made of ornate iron work and, in lieu of a comforter or sheets, the bed is covered with a black and white ornate tile pattern. A small, white triangular flag stands at the center of the bed’s headboard. Beneath the bed frame, there is a two-toned parquet floor in the shape of a seven-sided star. Underneath the wire chair and to its left is a nightstand or a small table suggested in white lines. On the furthest right bedpost, there is an explosion of ladder imagery. Even further to the right, there are red lines ascending and disappearing into to the top right corner of the canvas, suggesting ladder rungs. To the left of this ladder is the transferred image of what appears to be a black watch tower, its ladder intersecting the former like an X over the bed. At this intersection of ladders there is a flurry of images, among them are eagle and hawk heads, their bodies seemingly mangled among stripes and stylized star patterns reminiscent of those that are on the bed. In the background, there are grayish white paint splatters on black, seeming to erupt or crash above the clashing imagery. The paint spatters occupy the upper left half of the painting and drip down into the chaos below. “
Francesca DiMattio
Francesca DiMattio — b. 1981, New York; lives in New York
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