Graham Mateer: Altered Images

Images by Graham Mateer

“Stripping back is quintessentially a work of interpretation” - Fred Scott

Architect Graham Mateer has shared a series of digitally manipulated images with us; two paintings from the height of the Italian Renaissance and a third from seventeenth century Holland. The paintings have been edited to remove their subjects as well as the furniture and furnishings, a process which foregrounds the light, materiality and spatiality of the depicted architectural settings.

GM “Knowing that artists of that era usually painted the architecture first and then overpainted the items and people, I was interested in how the paintings looked at this stage - after the structure of the image was complete and before the life was added. In this way the process felt less like alteration and more like archeology, removing layers and returning the images to a moment in their own past.

Although by no means done in a scientific way, the completed images give us a snapshot of how the paintings may have appeared at a key stage of their development. One which usually only the artist is privileged to see.”

NOTES

Pietro Perugino, The Annunciation, 1497

Vicenzo Catena, Saint Jerome in his Study, circa 1508-12

Pieter de Hooch, Card Players in a Sunlit Room, 1658

Published 21st February