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like the Back to the Future retro-avant we see currently dominating fashion and politics, nostalgia is candied. The "again" of greatness we are implored to make becomes unhinged from any particular time the imperative could point at. "Again" becomes merely reactionary twist to flood cliche with the nostalgia fueling it. "Again" never was but today repainting the past. These paintings are that "again:" signifieds ripped from referable time. Painting translates into into some anachronistic slide of retro-present, between icons, CGI renderings, "photorealism," illustrations: whatever their means of referring to any realness is lost, and this loss of reality ironically allows the viewer or voter to inflate with their interpretable own. Depictions have all but become completely untethered from physicality, and Cerletty has seeming captured the balloons adrift. These are fake images, but inability to determine the level of artificiality makes them unnerving. Cerletty's stripping the metadata turns everything into clues pointing as interpretable evidence to a time that never took place but in the speakers allowing you to formulate it yourself.
see too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque