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My work is made up from the discards of our society: the cast-off paper, cardboard, rubber stamps, metal, wood, linoleum, and findings most people would avoid while traversing our urban landscapes.

In the hermetic tradition of the Middle Ages, I’ve joined the alchemist’s brotherhood in a quest to animate materials: meager findings turned into precious objects. I share with Duchamp, Schwitters, Tapies, Cornell, and Bueys the joy of instinctual bonding of objects that singly don’t belong together–yet collectively do.

For me, these "good-for-nothing" objects contain a coded message of pittura metaphysica, or metaphysical enigma, redolent with dreams, symbols, primordial archetypes, narratives, nonsense, and musings. I integrate the objects into principled compositions that reveal, to quote Max Ernst, "their secret souls."

I’d like to rekindle the embers left unattended in the viewer’s inner self–to illuminate childlike playfulness long forgotten along the way to adulthood.

- Dismas Rotta