Cultural heritage is a rich resource to be mined.

Joel Carreiro’s practice exists entirely within the realm of extant art imagery, which is awash with preexisting cultural associations. By making art from bits and pieces of earlier artworks, he transforms them into a distinct visual language, emerging from the assumption that things are not fixed in their identities, but can be changed into other things. He cobbles together hybrids to create images suggesting a world we cannot see, yet still sense the existence and importance of.

Carriero is ultimately a collage artist whose work evolves from a close reading of objects from the past such as Renaissance paintings, eighteenth and nineteenth-century drawings, European decorative objects, and Medieval manuscript marginalia. He studies these sources to sense alternate configurations and compositions latent in the works. His work arrives from these sources, progressively teasing out new images.

He has found a way of making art from bits and pieces of earlier artworks.  He sees his sources not as inert objects with definitive identities, but as mutable and available for transformation. He enjoys the process of coaxing an image out of its prior identity and allowing it to assume a new one. Assembled from parts of highly representational source images, the resulting new works emerge largely as abstractions. The image retains recognizable vestiges of its original identity and also assumes its new one, in a sort of parallel play.