With a play on the Velvet Underground’s album White Light/White Heat, Mattia Biagi’s White Light/Pitch Black exhibition celebrates an art punk aesthetic of recontextualizing familiar objects and subverting longstanding symbols of culture and domestic life. The dynamics of transformation is a driving concept and process behind Biagi’s work, in particular the transformative power of coating everyday objects with layers of viscous tar. In this context the decorative baroque chandelier, the ultimate symbol of domestic luxury, has its symbolic and cultural value subverted and transformed into an object of unexpected dark beauty, made all the more mysterious by the addition of a single minimal, modern light source penetrating it. The chandelier remains a light source, but not at all with the same meaning or purpose it once had. Its purpose has been undermined and yet somehow made more sublime through a mysterious rather than ostentatious beauty. Alongside the chandeliers are a new series of round paintings. Here the transformative power of tar is explored on its own terms, as the singular materiality of painting. The black disks are reminiscent of vinyl records, an indirect reference to another type of domestic object. While on one level these minimal yet richly textured tar forms conjure dark themes like voids or black holes, they simultaneously invoke the opposite, their perfect geometric circularity referencing solid presence, totality and completion.

www.MattiaBiagi.com

Mattia Biagi talks about his art and how he wants to encourage the viewer to recall there principles and spiritual values by which we can base and build a better world. The message is universal, without distinction of races, ethnicities and religions. The exhibition will not promote any dogma or any particular belief. It will not be misinterpreted or be blasphemous and offensive. The show wants to convey a positive message of hope: Jesus is the most congenial symbol that Mattia could have chosen to express his ideas. mattiabiagi.com Created by www.nicholasjreid.com

Mattia Biagi : Los Angeles Storm of life show opening . video by Nick J.Reid

This short film follows the story of artist Mattia Biagi, and a project commisioned by Johnnie Walker Black label.

Mattia Biagi and his tar and bronze teddy

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are” Each situation, event, conversation, object, means something different to all those involved, and also to those not involved. We give different meanings, according to our belief systems, and how we are affected by the event. We look at situations, events, art, according to our own set of past experiences, culture, faith, values, all of which help us from our beliefs about ourselves, about others, and about the world in general. The meaning we give to events, the way we make sense of our world, is based upon our set of core beliefs. Superstition is a pejorative term for belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any natural process linking the two events, such as astrology, religion, omens, witchcraft, that contradicts natural science 2010

Today flowers are a favorite way to express our feelings. At joyful times or on sad occasions when words fail us, we turn to flowers to show others how much we care.... -2014