On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Davide has been in DUMBO since the end of the least century. Davide Cantoni’s studio is at 68 Jay Street, #213.
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What will we see in your studio?
Some older works from the last 20+ years leading up to the latest works, the specular paintings. The Specular Paintings represent how the world feels to me at the moment, duplicitous, doubled. Each work consists of a pair of canvases/paper-reflections of each other. They are one and the same but also opposites. Copies and originals. Two realities. The canvases which are made together, are untouched by any tools except for the paint and canvas. Foregoing brushes and, in a sense, even his own hands, the artist presses the canvases together and smears layers of paint between them, spreading it on both sides at the same time; the paintings almost make themselves.
As reflected copies of each other, the two resulting canvases are one and the same but also their own opposite. Though separate, they are both simultaneously “originals” and copies of one another, mirrored counterparts, and together, they become the complete work. Each pair is an invitation to spatial access to a kind of doubled place, a doubled reality. The viewer is located between the image and its mirrored reflection, never really knowing which is which.
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About the artist: Born in Italy, Davide Cantoni completed his BA Fine Art at the Slade school in London where he was awarded a Boise travel scholarship in 1988 for an exchange year at the Hochschule Der Kunst in Berlin. Attended the Royal College of Art and received an MA (RCA) in Painting in 1993. His work has been shown extensively in Europe (lately at the National Archeological Museum of Naples ( MANN)) and the USA as well as South Korea, and is included in many public and private collections, MOMA and OSRAM and RAMO collections amongst others. @davidecantoni