Melisa Mastrangelo Lertora

This body of work, in which we create our art on an assemblage of wooden tiles, came about as a collaboration between my husband and myself in 2018. Horacio is a pop artist and creates his own large-scale stencils of his drawings on mylar sheets of which he cuts out using a box cutter without the aid of stencil machines, lasers or other digital applications. His intricate stencils are often created in layers, with each color representing its own stencil. I am an acrylic painter who enjoys working with bold colors, original antique paper in the form of wallpaper, newspaper, comic books, cook books, etc. I create the backgrounds using supporting material to Horacio’s subjects in the form of original ephemera, paint and hand dyed fabric on wooden tiles. After each tile is finished, we distress the edges using sandpaper and adhere them to a cradled panel of birch. The finished result takes on the aesthetic of a wooden tapestry or quilt, each piece telling its own story. We are proud to say that our entire process is done by hand.