Artist Biography

“When I paint I am a song.”

Emanuel Mattini’s artistic gifts matured through extensive training in painting and photography at the Atlanta College of Art. The result is an imagery of many textures and cultures, embracing past traditions and present concerns in both the western and eastern worlds. Just as the Polish-born author Joseph Conrad became an eloquent and unique voice in English literature, Emanuel’s art has begun to mark the evolution of Western art. Combining a profound knowledge of history with a sensitive awareness of his current cultural surroundings, Emanuel’s art presents an original expression of our time.

Built primarily on the art of collage, Emanuel’s art is woven from a fabric of tradition. Much more than a theoretical exercise or a decorative statement, his approach to collage embodies the masters, such as Rauschenberg, Braque and Carra, but also transcends their modernist stance, moving toward a more sensuous and sincere artistic space. In this, his vision encompasses the twentieth century experience while also intuiting the aesthetic outlook of the new millennium.

Seeking new psychological and philosophical perspectives, Mattini paints almost exclusively en serie–allowing infinite variations to unfold and multiply from a single, rational framework. This style approaches the postmodern, de-centered attitudes of late-twentieth century art. This diversity mirrors our own multicultural society. Moreover, as his work is saturated with the theme of music, each canvas is injected with sound and opened up to additional senses and interpretations.

Influences

Emanuel Mattini is an artist strongly influenced by music – his works are melodies played in textured forms – brilliant in color, exciting and fresh in design – a metamorphosis of the extension of music into art – human form transposed to music, music to art, art to human expression, and human expression to the rhythm of life. The quieting play of sound, the expression of scale relating to the yin and yang of color and motion, his sound of art is a freshness of style and approach – a blend of the modern with antique, reflecting an age of quality – quality of meaning, quality of image. His original oils on canvas are limited editions with each frame being hand painted by the Mattini.

Emanuel’s sense of space and color are also unique in their balanced disorder. Especially in the large-scale abstractions, color strikes an immediate, emotional chord, delivering sensations that are at once emphatic and romantic, concrete and metaphysical, post-modern and baroque. In these paintings, platonic ideals mingle with tangible objects to create scenes that could be straight from Donne’s poetry–always transferring energy from the physical world into a more spiritual realm.