Visual art has always been closely associated with storytelling and Cordero’s practice simultaneously engages narrative while presenting images in a non-narrative form. Influenced by the Neo-Expressionists of the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly the Italian Transavanguardia movement, Cordero aims to return to the traditional act of painting; one that elicits emotion and meaning through intensity of process, image and narrative. However, his work takes shape as a series of loosely connected episodes, linked through ambiguous themes and images but highly individual in themselves.

In this new series Cordero chooses to ground his imagery in metaphor. Concerned with ritual and myth, as well as the essence of experience; he creates haunted landscapes punctuated by everyday objects as well as strange primitive half-human, half-animal beings that are either hunter or hunted, victor or victim. These forms are rendered simply and economically, the colour is intense and mark making bold and direct. There is almost no sense of illusionistic space, rather shifts of scale are as schematic as the figures. Cordero uses colour and texture to underscore the immediacy of the experience, all of which acts as a conveyor of mood.

Matteo Cordero (b. 1988) is an Italian Contemporary artist, born in Mondovì he now lives and works in Turin. In 2016, he graduated with an MA Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art, London and in 2017 he was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition displaying a large portrait in Gallery VI curated by Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA). Cordero's work is in a number of private international collections.