Michael Frassinelli • Artist

Danforth Annual Juried Exhibition

My painting Pianista Cabinet of Wonders (Remps Replica) will be included in the Danforth Museum Annual Juried Exhibition and part of their 50th Anniversary celebration.

Artist Statement

Pianista Cabinet of Wonders (Remps Replica)

(For Danforth Juried Exhibition 2025)

For the past 20 years I have been making sculpture out of the variety of materials found in salvaged piano parts. These objects have taken various forms, from large-scale structures, wheeled vehicles, and even a small boat, to smaller objects such as weapons, masks, and other things that are hard to classify. Together, these works form the series I have called The Legend of the Pianistas, and are often displayed in the style of a natural history museum, as if they were artifacts from a lost civilization. I describe it as historical fiction with objects.

 The most recent additions to this series have been a number of medium and large-scale paintings of these various objects, arranged in cabinets (also constructed of piano parts) in the tradition of cabinets of curiosities—collections of scientific, historical, and unusual specimens that were popular from the Renaissance through the Victorian era. These paintings are rendered in a hyperrealist trompe l’oeil style, often with dramatic lighting, like in the Dutch still lifes of the 17th century.

 The title of this painting, Pianista Cabinet of Wonders (Remps Replica) refers to the artist Domenico Remps, a German artist working in Italy, whose 1689 painting, Cabinet of Curiosities inspired the style and composition of my painting. The original work contained images of man-made objects such as carved ivory spheres, paintings, and scientific instruments, and natural artifacts such as colorful coral, beetles, and even a human skull. I recreated my own versions of each of these objects, as well as the wooden cabinet itself, using only piano parts. I arranged these new artifacts to replicate the exact placement of objects in the Remps painting, matching the lighting and forced perspective as well. The final painting has the same uncanny realism of the original, but with the underlying feeling that these real, “fictional” artifacts were somehow meaningful in some unknown past.