FURROW
A conversation between Leonardo Veloce and Dominic Myatt.
Personal Project
FURROW
A conversation: Dominic Myatt & Leonardo Veloce
Edited by Simon Chilvers.
It was just nice to observe you drawing and how the light was hitting your body. There was something beautiful about the charcoal appearing on the white paper and your white body against the black backdrop. I was sketching on the floor but we were composing the images together even though you were behind the camera. It felt natural. We were talking the whole time, about our work and our day to day lives. I was really excited, as I love your work and I love the way you look. So what could be better than to have you naked in my studio, just drawing? It just felt very free. Having your clothes off, it can separate people.There is still taboo and prudishness around nakedness even people who aren’t really conservative, so in the moment when someone is comfortable with you being naked, and that there are no facades or walls then that’s enough to feel free, and then you can be at your most creative. I felt very free. From a visual point of view, you look almost unreal, like you’re coming out of your drawings. There were moments that I forgot it was you and thought it was one of your characters. It felt like you were object and subject at the same time.
I always have trouble with titles. I try not to be too guiding to a particular idea. It’s always working backwards so saying something that might illicit something. I was thinking about drawing a line, engraving, etching, clean lines, my skin on the black background. Then I thought of furrow, like a furrow in the ground, like sowing something in the ground. The more different meanings, the more exciting it felt. The furrow of a brow. I think furrow sounds and seems like something in between our worlds. I like the idea of one word with multiple meanings. Something that can mean different things to different people, like how we see different things in our work. Yes. The ambiguity of the word I liked. I also like how it sounds in your mouth. It also sounds like burrow, something getting under your skin. A bit gross, quite invasive but also the way you might talk about an idea getting into your head. Seeing your drawings on the photographs was beautiful. The pictures had become a canvas. The images were pure and they became messy and it was fascinating to see my images become chaotic. My pictures are very tidy usually, like my thoughts.
The first time I came across your work, my mind exploded. I remember it was a series of sketches - visual notes you posted on Stories in Instagram and it was from a time when you were working in a sex club, just 15 seconds each and I think they were written on the back of a receipts? Coat tickets. And I could sense the darkness and the kinkiness and the feral sexuality of it but at the same time they looked like the statues I used to look at when I was a kid in Italy. It was so beautiful but so sexually driven. There was no romanticism, it was very feral. But then there is romanticism in the most feral moments. People tend to separate things. You’re either a romantic boy or you’re a feral boy but the two really go together. It’s a vicious circle! I don’t know where it stops. When you think about it more and more, you see that they’re super connected. You see that it’s deeply super animal but also that there is a total beauty. Your work has a poetic pre-occupation with beauty. But there’s a connection between us around the body and where sexuality lies within that. What’s sexy. What’s not sexy. My work can face that quite front on. Your work is more questioning, subtle. But together they’re vibrating together but just on slightly different frequencies. With painting and illustrations there is a very beautiful way to leave certain things concealed but in photography you can become extremely obvious immediately. I never shoot with the intent of being sexy. I always want it to be honest. My ultimate goal is showing you how I see you.
Art it’s your vision, your thoughts and feelings. Art is an overwhelming word. Art in general is like a universal language that operates with emotions, but I also believe it involves the ability of mastering skills. It’s about excellence. Art is your point of view made visible or perceptible for someone else. For other people to experience and digest in their own way. I feel like I could talk all day about what is art or isn’t art. But on an emotional level, there is no art without generosity. Art is about giving yourself, you share your gaze, you share your fears, your intimate desires, your dreams, your hopes. The way you do this is through curiosity. It can also be about ego and narcissism. It depends on the artist. But it can be about power and forcing people to see your point. It is also vulnerability. It also involves a never-ending research of our spectrum of emotions and the universal experience. Art reaches this very universal language where at the end of the day art is life speaking to life again.
I’m a photographer, obviously, but I think of myself more a researcher. My art is an attempt to visual everything that is going on in my head, a maelstrom of thoughts and imagery. Aesthetically, it is chaotic, disjointed, fervent, ecstatic, depressing, violent and sweet. Lots of contradictions and juxtapositions and playing with things in between. But visually, like chaos and abstraction, joy. A hot mess! I think my first understanding of art was beauty. I was always looking for beauty constantly which was probably how I got to fashion. I feel like it took me years to understand how to express other things that art is something that brings you joy and peace. Or brings out your fears or melancholic side. You’ve said it’s about sharing. I feel that is important too, finding kindred spirits. I don’t want my art to dictate or lecture someone on an idea or a point of view, it’s more like a seed. It’s giving people the ingredients but they don’t have the recipe. Sometimes, I think there are so many things I would like to be doing but we have what 80 or 90 years? How many things can I possibly do? Photography sometimes really serves the purpose. You can be each day in a very different place with very different people in a very different setting talking in a very different and I find a lot of fascination in that. What I really love in these experiences, is how people can guide me into understanding exactly what I truly like rather than what society tells me to like. So I find it extremely inspiring to work with other creatives, artists, subjects who can show me the other side of the meadow.