Anthony Catania’s depictions of myths and fables enchant and repel, producing intensely subversive and idiosyncratic portraits of legendary beings in unconventional settings. Always on the threshold of grotesque figurative painting, his style confounds expectations and evades categorization. At times meticulous, at others seemingly agitated, his technique is indebted to a profound love for the great masters of art, from the cave artists of Lascaux to contemporary graphic novel artists. His works are windows to alternative worlds seen through a glass darkly.

Catania's personal exhibitions, Selve Oscure, The Cave of Centaurs, The Piper’s Requiem, and Spectre-Bark revisited Dantesque, Ovidian, Coleridgian and fabled stories. Through allegorical experimentations these myths were transformed into dark, distorted and hyperbolic visualizations of wispy elongated limbs, skeletal grotesqueries and mottled macabre fantasies. His fragmented and decentered palette, though dominated by black, also incorporates Byzantine golden hues, blood reds, marine blues, astral whites, dark earth colours.

In his latest exhibition entitled Last Light, the archetypal representation was Death itself in the process of being annihilated. It is the death of the future and the past; the demise of the ancient Greek and St John’s representations of death. Death, depicted on his Stygian barge, or with his apocalyptic pale horse, disseminates into nothingness. This very concept plays on the notion of the death of vision itself and the limits of representation. The image verges on thresholds of the figurative, comprehensible at some point so as to imbue the human eye with reminiscences of life-in-death.