The artist seizes a person’s radiography and insert himself in it, heading for a visionary trip and living an experience of familiarity and estrangement which strenghtens his sign’s motivation.
Matteo Forli has always been attracted to organic molecules, wherein genetic information resides.
His latest works fall within his “from extraterrestrial to inner space” voyage experience, performed for the “Artrè” Bruna Solinas Contemporary Art Gallery, Genoa, a trenchant personal exhibition, representative of all his ideational, composite, materic and imaginative scenario.
Documented by images and texts of the present exhaustive catalogue, the exhibition is structured on six great canvases, titled “Untitled”, performed with a mixed technique on a serigraphic screen – a few of them carrying a visual memory of the gestural force of Emilio Scanavino’s tangles – followed by five works of numbered Fossils, treated with sand, flatting, spray paint and black enamel paint on prepared canvas, a bunch of anatomical sketches made with crayon, china and marker pen, three X-ray plates treated with serigraphic interventions focusing on identity research and some still frames taken out of videos reffering to the artist riveting live performances.
Matteo Forli doesn’t favour only disused structures, abandoned warehouses, but story of life samples, geological formations such as fossils.
The artist is mesmerized by the shape, the prints and the signs time left on these long time dead organisms which had been pure energy and that once buried, before decaying process started “Sedimento” turned into sediments like sand or mud, and, carried away by the water, they laid down on the ocean floor, thus transferring throughout the centuries from the Biosphere “Biosfera” into the Lithosphere,”Litosfera” from life to stone.
This passage to another modality of existence fascinates the artist and coax him into to rethinking in his works the terms of a transformation, of a powerful and unrelenting metamorphosis of the matter.
Under the effects of this suggestion the artist pictorially reproduces the earth crust, the sedimentary rocks, the lava flows and the ashes, captating the vestigial presences arising from his imaginal world.
Matteo Forli blends an academic formation – which links him, as far his sign is concerned, to Secessionism and Viennese Actionism – together with a multimedial performing attitude.
The resulting match is original indeed, since on the one hand we can perceive the quality of an historical depth and a natural talent in sketching signs and graphs on wide surfaces, while on the other we can clearly recognize his orientation choice in the audio-visual action field.
His tool arsenal comprise black enamel, pens, square leads, chalks, transparent flatting and spray paint, employed to soften and dim the brush raw imprinting.
On the vernissage day during a video projection which will embed the artist in action the observer would perceive the artwork as the becoming of a mutant being.
The days that follow a monitor or a recorded video will stay put in a loop repeating the event.
On the graphic arts domain pertaining the engraving of plexiglass the artist performs an experimentation of his own employing serigraphic screens.
The anatomic interiors, structured upon faint tracing graphisms and hairy filaments, are treated like a vegetal, floral world, where muscular sheafs and tendon sheaths show the venations of a petal, a stem or a corolla.
A few paintings on canvas forex and metal display an evanescent subject radiating a ghostly light, pointing out to a body radiography promptly seized by the artist, intervening with fluid passages of nervous terminations tremors.
