Joel Carreiro

Joel Carreiro`s collage work evolves from a close reading cultural of objects from the past such as Renaissance paintings, eighteenth and nineteenth-century drawings, European decorative objects, Medieval manuscript marginalia. He studies these sources to sense alternate configurations and compositions latent in the works. His work arrives from these sources, progressively teasing out new images.

He has found a way of making art from bits and pieces of earlier artworks. He sees his sources not as inert objects with definitive identities, but as mutable and available for transformation. He enjoys the process of coaxing an image out of its prior identity and allowing it to assume a new one. Assembled from parts of highly representational source images, the resulting new works emerge largely as abstractions. The image retains recognizable vestiges of its original identity and also assumes its new one, in a sort of parallel play.

Carreiro has exhibited widely. His most recently solo show was “Picturesque Philosophy” at Murray State University in Kentucky. Upcoming shows include Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA and the Latvian Art Academy in Riga.

He is also active as an independent curator. His most recent project was “Polymorphous”, a group exhibition at Cluster Gallery in Brooklyn. Upcoming curatorial projects include “I Feel an Earthquake Every Day”, an installation by EunSun Choi; a solo show of Drawings and Collages by Daniel Mantilla; and an installation by Carrie Rubinstein, all presented at Thomas Hunter Project Space in NYC. He will also curate a solo show and catalog for Creighton Michael at Georgia’s Columbus State University.