Hybrida

Opening Thursday, 24 June 2023,

MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea is happy to present Matteo Basilé’s first solo show in its gallery in Pietrasanta, drawing the attention of the public to the new hybrid experiments of one of the most interesting innovators on the Italian art scene since the mid-nineties. For more than twenty years Basilé has been demonstrating how digital culture is integrated with analogue idioms, and his work continues to be a virtuous synthesis of mechanics and electronics, tradition and innovation, real and virtual settings, painstaking hand craftsmanship and exemplary technology.

The Hybrida exhibition includes photographic works of various sizes interpreting and representing the contemporary metamorphosis of the Self, the Other and Elsewhere. Through an archive of inspirations constructed during the pandemic, the Roman artist scrutinises coincidences and discordances, sounding out the grace and the complexity of atypical and unexpected identities. His photographic diary tells the stories and secrets of extraordinary individuals, pilgrims outside time, whose faces are often covered with mysterious masks that are disturbing, magnetic, but also magical and liberating, coming into contact with the soul of ancient and mystical places. The harmonies of sublime architectures and landscapes, in which man is an ambiguous, often surreal apparition, alternate with works against flat backdrops explicitly referencing the great masters of the past: from Flemish art isolating female figures and imposing upon them a Rembrandt-style centrality to evocations of the Baroque, in which light, colour and Caravaggio-like angles place the characters in sumptuous settings.

Basilé’s anti-heroes are meticulous, realistic portraits which are however permeated with strong, at times ideal imagery, inspiring meditation on the often unsettling truths of the human condition, extrapolating memories of past civilisations, interwoven with glimpses of contemporary life in which the homes and dreams of the people represented flow together. Basilé glimpses furtive yet persistent desires, translated with lightness, depth and vibrant warmth, in a voyage that supersedes the old geographic, political and ideological barriers, aiming to found a “new hybrid genealogy” in which intimacy and otherness coexist in perfect harmony and a focus on singularity and its peculiarities offer alternative paths to beauty. A story outside of time, in what the artist calls the “marvellous monstrosity” of being human.