Gabriele Di Matteo shows a further developement of the famous work Las Meninas by Diego Velàzquez at Federico Luger Gallery (today Wizard Gallery). Las Meninas (1656) had been registered under the title “Cuadro de Familia”  in the inventory of the Palacio Real in Madrid.

Gabriele Di Matteo collaborates with the CPCN; a cooperative of commercial Neapolitan painters directed by Salvatore Russo. The work has been executed by these Neapolitan painters, who were commissioned to make 20 commercial  copies of this famous piece. This strategy demands that we establish a distinction between an author's copy and a commercial copy. The first doesn’t possess a style of its own and tries to imitate an original painting as faithfully as possible. On the other hand, the artisan which work on such a copy doesn’t do so from a particular cultural or geographic context. The latter, however, is devoted to the imitation, not of certain original works, but of certain pictorial topics directly associated to the cultural heritage of a geographical area. The commercial copy is also characterized for its minimum time of production.

Cuadro de Familia is composed by 20 commercial copies of Velázquez major work on a 1 : 1 scale ( 318 x 276 cm). Each copy is subdivided in 16 parts, producing a total of 320 fragments. The utopist fascination resides in the attempt of reproducing them all mechanically; the artist which repaints these canvases can only do so imperfectly, in full awareness of the impossibility of producing an identical copy. The choice of dividing the piece in 16 parts comes from an old practice traditionally employed to increase sale possibilities or to please the collector: cutting the painted canvas in various pieces to improve its manageability. Gabriele Di Matteo rescues this historical  ruse taking into account that his own work speaks about the meaning of “copy”, “multiple”, and the problem of authorship and authenticity. Di Matteo reflects about the power and autonomy of the image and the persuasive force of art, still linked to the romantic myth.

In this mirror maze ( composed by 320 fragments), the painted work confronts the canvas which is being painted and all the characters play their roles directly confronting the many figures which observe the observer.
 
The “velazquian” mirror in a certain sense precedes the work of Di Matteo and the concept of refiguration  itself.