About the artist
Henry Mattei
Brooklyn, New York
Henry Mattei is a Brooklyn-based artist working with sculpture and painting. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and an Italian American father, he explores his relationship with Puerto Rico through making, independent study, and learning Spanish. Alongside the artwork, he is developing a documentary and interview project, with writing emerging from the same inquiry.
On his first childhood visit to Puerto Rico, Henry Mattei chose a Ponce vejigante mask and brought it home. In his bedroom, he felt it watched over him. That early relationship with an object still informs his work: the mask’s horns, color and dotted surfaces reappear in paintings and sculptures made through a patient practice of attention.
His mother left Puerto Rico for the South Bronx at fifteen, without speaking English. Mattei grew up in the Northeast without learning her Spanish. His art follows the connection between them toward an island he is still learning to know. The colors of vejigante masks, Old San Juan’s houses, and Puerto Rico’s landscape and food enter his paintings and sculptures as references he continues to seek out and study.
Roman Catholicism was the faith handed to Mattei at birth. He chose to leave it and develop a spiritual practice of his own, finding connection in the woods, around places and objects he encountered or fashioned himself. Later, his study of Taíno spiritual traditions helped him recognize affinities with experiences he had already lived. His work grows from that recognition and his belief that spirit is present throughout physical life.
In the studio, cardboard from delivery boxes becomes an armature beneath layers of papier-mâché and heavy body acrylic paint. Horns rise from sculptures and break the planes of canvases. Across their surfaces, Mattei places dots one by one, likening the intention of each mark to a rosary bead within his own spiritual practice. Repetition becomes a way to attend to his own state of being. He reads the differences between marks as traces of his presence: how steady he feels, where his attention goes, and how he returns to the task.
The prickly forms bring that attention into the viewer’s physical world. Their textures can startle the senses and make an encounter feel newly immediate. Mattei hopes his works can become lasting presences in other people’s lives, as the mask became in his: objects through which an everyday relationship can deepen into a spiritual one.
Film and writing in development
Following a
maternal connection.
Alongside the artwork, Mattei is developing a documentary and interview project tracing his maternal connection to Puerto Rico. The traditions surrounding vejigante masks offer an entry into conversations about culture, making and spirituality.
Learning Spanish, following family history, and encounters with the island will inform the inquiry. Writing grows from the same questions that emerge in the studio.
Contact the studio