About — Matthew Cangiano

‍ ‍The Idea wants to become Flesh, and Flesh wants to become the Idea. Every artist, on some level, knows this. It is not enough to say ‘As Above, So Below’. If A simply equals B, everything collapses. What about the space in-between? What about the ascent and the descent, what about reciprocity and transformation? This is what concerns me.

Take dreams for example; my goal is not to ‘depict’ or somehow ‘mirror’ them in paint or pencil, but to extend them, to let them grow into the physical world in a way that only the physical world could facilitate. With my diagrams, lines demarcate the page not to die there, but to encounter an idea and be animated by it. An image ‘represented’ is an image not seen and not felt. For the image to be anything it must be both the result and the cause of a change in perception; in short it must be a lens. Whether it be painting, sound, poem or even an artist’s statement, an image is something that presents, rather than re-presents. If A simply equals B, if A is less than B, everything collapses.

Flesh and Idea desire each other because they want to keep on living and to live one must go on changing. In this everything is transformed. A seed or a plant does not merely progress from one state to another, they become into and within each other. Miraculously: a new seed emerges, a new plant emerges. Art, having a foot in each door, affords us the opportunity to engage with the middle. The seed and the plant, the Idea and the Flesh, are not the same and they are not different, they are polarities of a vast circulatory system. I find myself here in the veins and arteries of this mysterious Body.

In the spirit of ‘productive polarity’ Matthew Cangiano has experimented with a vast number of mediums, schools of thought and educational forms. This includes some of the most contrasting polarities in arts education: a BFA at OCADU (2016), and two years studying and teaching at the traditional style atelier ‘Academy of Art Canada’ (2022-2024). Ultimately he remains ‘in-between’. Matthew currently works in Toronto, Ontario.