Untitled

In a dandyish game of semiotics, the pair of hands in Mathew Cerletty’s Untitled make an ambiguous gesture. Having found great acclaim working in a hyperreal painterly mode in the early 2000s, Cerletty has also translated his skill to more abstracted takes on consumer products and text-based images; the classical motion of these hands, severed from any context, makes a similar reduction of image to sign. The white sleeve, polished fingernails and dark skin should all offer some narrative clue, but are resisted by the flat, slate-grey background and a neat frame of clean dark green. These elements also seem to negate the traditional art-historical associations of the languid pointing signal, which is found in Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist (c.1513-16) and countless other medieval and Renaissance paintings; the pointing finger was often linked with the creative gesture of the painter themselves, or, aiming heavenward, made reference to God as creator above all. Slickly refashioning the hands’ significance to his own stylish ends, Cerletty’s cleverly fragmented image offers contemporary visual language as a seductive vision of free-floating graphic intent.