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santomatteo is a Milan-based duo whose collaborative and performative practice unsettles the physical, psychic, intellectual and emotional boundaries that demarcate individual identities. Comprised of Santo Tolone and Matteo Mascheroni, two artists who have never practiced separately, santomatteo’s first Australian exhibition was presented at TCB as part of the Making Space: Artist Run Initiatives in Victoria festival in May and June of this year.
The title of santomatteo’s exhibition TVB was shorthand for ‘Tu voglio bene’, a colloquial Italian phrase used to express goodwill or love for another. Thus, TVB investigated the nature and parameters of love and friendship, presenting a series of distinctive self-portraits that visually articulated the classical concept of the friend as the second self. Like the figure of the centaur that informs the self-produced santomatteo logo, TVB presented the two artists as liminal beings; symmetrical, porous and symbiotic, caught between two natures, the embodiment of untamed nature and masculinity.
Upon entering TCB, the visitor was greeted with It’s me, 2006, a large-scale photographic portrait installed at ceiling-height above the entrance to the main gallery. Featuring a devotional-style image of a balding, moustached man, his eyes cast downwards like an angel’s, the portrait’s raw, direct photographic style belied the work’s otherwise kitsch aesthetic.
Following the photographic subject’s gaze to the opposite gallery wall, the viewer encountered a second portrait of what looked like the same man in counter-pose; a doppelganger whose similarly adoring, dewy gaze was this time directed upwards, drawing the viewer into the divine scene. On closer inspection however, it become apparent that the two contemplative figures were in fact different people shaped in the same image, the two artists locked in a dual gaze