We know practically everything about the great paintings in art history. When they were made, with what techniques, who commissioned them, and how they travelled over the centuries. But there’s one thing we still don’t know. All those painted figures, the ladies and the kings, the peasants and the courtesans, who are they looking at? What’s on the other side of the canvas? What would we see if we could break through the fourth wall of art’s greatest masterpieces?
These are, presumably, the questions that Domingo Geronimo Mattle asked himself — an artist known on Instagram as @realurbanartistry, who went viral by painting “the other side” of the world’s best-known masterpieces.
With the series The Other Side, Domingo Geronimo Mattle imagines what lies on the other side of what we see and paints it, faithfully following the style, colours and technique of the original painting.
He’s done it with Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine and the Portrait of Louise Vernet, with Pompeo Batoni’s Apollo and Two Muses and Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, and even with Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon in His Study. In all of these cases, what Mattle depicts could plausibly reflect reality.
Other times, though, the artist lets his creativity take over and adds elements that make the reveal particularly funny, as with Grant Wood’s American Gothic — renamed by Mattle American Propaganda — in which, according to the artist, the two farmers are looking at nothing less than a UFO.
At first glance, the idea might look like a joke, but the care and attention Domingo Geronimo Mattle puts into painting each piece make this project (or experiment) entirely believable. And we can’t wait to see the back of every other masterpiece we studied at school.
