Matteo Basilé (1974) was born and currently lives in Rome. His career began in the early ’90s as one of the European’s earliest artists that merged art and technology. Basilé’s unique artistic research therefore succeeded in conciliating- apparently incompatible – opposing ideas such as beauty and grotesque, real and surreal, natural and artificial. Exploring the nature of humankind, the artist developed his own narrative, according to successive chapters: What is Left of the Transavanguarde (2006), The Saints are Coming (2007), Thisoriented (2009), Thishumanity (2010), Landing (2012), Unseen (2014), Pietra Santa (2016), Viaggio al centro della terra (Journey to the Center of the Earth) (2017), Stardust (2018), Memento (2019), Mnemosyne (2021)
A series of independent transitions where the artist negotiated his perception of existence. Basilé’s research can be considered as an interface between East and West (he in fact lived and worked for almost 8 years in South East Asia) , a dialectic that operates as a collision between tradition and modernity, between sacred and profane… Basilé’s glossary is not merely based on multicultural and timeless signs or values (timeless and multicultural), for it instead visually includes a more global idiom where the connubial between dream , fantasy and real is no longer the predominant character of his photographs, as his own personal experience and sense of the real epitomize an utterly, recognizable and unlimited narrative. His Anti-Eroes are featured as meticulous portraits, realistic, though permeated with imaginary, and, every now and then, idealization, recalling classical history though always embedding the spirit of the present time. Formally, Basilé obliterates the antagonism between reality and imaginary, triggering a complex system of emotional sliding doors. Updating the famous statement by Goya “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, dream and reason here experience an epiphany converging into a perfect balance between intellect and sensorial perception (D. Lora). Basilé’s poetics is an iconographic universe, the result of a combination between Technological Mannerism and Pictorial Surrealism (A.B. Oliva). The dream-like journey of the artist leads us through a number of different levels of comprehension, sensorial, intellectual and spiritual. An uncanny dimension that results in an abrupt awareness of those aspect of reality that usually hide within inner selves. Therefore, the thorough investigation of the self, of the other and the elsewhere eventually corresponds to his personal experience facing both the sense of existence and the contexts of those confused dynamics defining globalization.
