SIMON MORETTI

Simon Moretti is an Italian artist based in London. His latest series of screen prints are derived originally from collage or juxtaposition of found imagery, altered to an important degree by technical misadventure. Simon Moretti extends the form with a combination of humble technology and his own idiosyncratic collection of materials and imagery. Starting with his archive of pages appropriated from magazines, art books and other sources, he doesn't set out with an idea or purpose, but allows the images to combine intuitively. Despite the soft tones and coherent surface of the prints you can see vestiges of the torn and cut pages, the rough ephemerality of the source material. At over 1.5m (64 inches) high, the size of the prints might bring to mind tapestries, or large-scale portrait paintings. The throwaway becomes almost monumental. This body of work draws on fashion and art imagery, contemporary, modern and historic pieces.

Another series of small, silver gelatine prints – or ‘Scanners’ – take their name from their birthplace: the scanner bed. Here Moretti arranges images, treating the glass surface of the scanner as a compositional space. The vestiges of the process – shadows of pages, visible cuts in the paper – are again important to the artist because they emphasise the scale and origin of the source imagery.  Moretti translates his distinctive cosmography into a series of tightly composed mysteries erupting with little beams, generating a web of appositional substance to entangle the viewer. 

His previous exhibitions include, Thank You for the Music, curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen, Sprueth Magers, Munich/London, The Art Parade, Deitch Projects, New York, From A to B and Back Again, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris, Le Palais des Etoiles, commissioned by Selfridges, London, Dadadandy The Guerrilla Show with Vedovamazzei, MADRE Napoli, L’Intime , Le Collectioneur Derrier la Porte, La Maison Rouge. Paris, None of the Above, curated by John Armleder, Swiss Institute, New York, Now & Then curated by Adrian Dannatt, Harris Lindsay, London, Dadadandy Boutique Artprojx Space, London,The Sleep of Ulro, with Goshka Macuga, A Foundation, Liverpool Biennial 2006.