theplantnews
- 2 min read

Gueli’s i love these roads where the houses don’t change

By Miranda Lalla

Matteo Gueli, notorious for his bold colour palettes and mastery of texture and dimension—Dawson College's own King of All Things Moody—has risen to the forefront of the Montreal photographic community over the course of the past year. His isolated works—studies of rhythm, feel and fluidity, condensed into colour and frame—have always drawn their inspiration from alternative music, in an attempt to visually project the cathartic power that beat, lyric, and rhythm have on the adolescent mind. In this series, Gueli delicately intertwines complimentary mediums to speak to an experimental generation—a generation that came of age under pixel and stream, bound by the scope of their limited environment, while prompted to think and dream on a scale cataclysmically larger. Based on the album Pure Heroine, Lorde’s 2012 ode to the quotidian teen, Gueli captures in colour the emotional seclusion that comes with the process of growing up in—and most of all, out-growing—a static and deafeningly silent suburban backdrop. To say that he dismisses the uniformity of beige-toned row homes, or the endearing familiarity of scratched metal bleachers, would be a gross misinterpretation of this photographer’s intent. Under Gueli’s lens, the local infrastructure (sprung from necessity and municipal tax) once tread by the light-up sketchers of the Zoboomafoo generation now plays the stage for a titillating tale of introspection and self-discovery for the individuals that got their footing on it as young adults. Through the psychologically honest distortion of mood and perspective in favour of the protagonist, Gueli invites the viewer to consider their complex relationship with what they know as “home”, and most importantly, to honour and credit it as the moulding hand of the self-aware individual.