Matteo Basilé

Among the first to discover the expressive potential of computer art, the photographer Matteo Basilé, born in Rome in 1974, contaminates technology with the suggestions of the Italian artistic tradition, building dreamlike and surreal images. The light, the colors, the shots by Caravaggio and the sumptuous scenery of the Roman Baroque, but also the clarity of the Flemish and the deformed characters of Velázquez, animate the shots and videos of the Artist, where sculpture and architecture, painting and cinema merge. Suspended between the cult of beauty and narrative vocation, Basilé's works stage a humanity, always at the center of the artist's research, transfigured through multiple iconographic references. Saints, fools, warriors, monstrous creatures, or archaic faces like those captured on journeys to South East Asia, where the Italian photographer has found new impulses to tell that mystery that is proper to human existence. The Renaissance prototypes remain an implicit model for him. With Basilè the artistic story seeks emotions and thoughts, stories and mental propensities, lived and plausible dream. Matteo Basilè is son of art - his real surname is Cascella son of Tommaso and Pietro's nephew - and lives and works in Rome. He was one of the first to use digital art and found in it the stimulus to modernize images, in particular the portrait, superimposing and mixing with great formal refinement the faces and signs of modern technology. His research is a continuous contamination between icons of social serialization and archaic symbols such as votive offerings or ancient Asian idols. It is famous for light boxes and graphic prints on aluminum. Basilè is an artist of strong traditions towards the real future and is considered a major player in young Italian art scene. Among his many solo exhibitions we mention: Apparitions - MART Trento and Rovereto 2006 and 2009, Matteo Basilé Utopia - Museum of Modern Art Vittoria Colonna Pescara 2006, No Man's Land - Guidi & Schoen Genoa 2006 and 2012, Alchemical Primordiality 2005 and Thishumanity 2010 - Galleria Pack Milan, Lord of the Flies - Galerie Beukers Rotterdam 2004. He took part to Venice Biennale in 2009 and in 2011 representing the Italian pavilion and was also the winner of the New York Price, Columbia University 2002/2003.