MATTEO BASILÉ ^©  

(Roma, 1974)

C-print on aluminium and plexiglass
Cm 150 x 100
Unique in this format. Signed, dated and titled on the back
Exhibition “The Saints Are Coming - Last Act” at Galleria
EMMEOTTO, Rome, 2011

Basilè's world is "an iconographic universe resolved between
technological mannerism and pictorial surrealism through an
iconographic hybridization and a cultural contamination between
East and West" - Achille Bonito Oliva.


The suggestions of the East coexist in fact with a deep
rooting in Romanity.
The search for harmony and balance between the masses and the
chromatic agreements are distinctive elements of a research that pursues
beauty as the ultimate goal, and with exoticism, becomes the absolute
protagonist in images imbued with mysterious sensuality.
A strong surrealist connotation characterizes the photographs of
oriental characters lost in desolate landscapes, among
distant architectures, dominated by livid and leaden skies.
These calibrated iconographies live in surreal and virtual worlds
created digitally by moving from photographic images
realized with stagings like film sets; they shape
the real through fantasy, transported into a dreamlike dimension,
out of time and beyond a precise and identifiable physical space:
they are beautiful and restless and combine sacred and
profane, future and tradition, East and West.
Saints, madmen, warriors, monstrous creatures, or archaic faces
like those captured in travels in Southeast Asia, where the
Italian photographer finds new impulses to tell that mystery
that is typical of man's existence.