Luca Matti is a painter and sculptor with a great passion for animation. He has worked for a long time in comics, illustration and graphics, collaborating with magazines and publishing houses. Since 1988 he has devoted himself to painting and creating sculptural works in inner tubes, developing a very personal style that places him among the leading young artists on the Italian scene. Since '94, his work has focused on themes related to man's relationship with the city, using only two colors: black and white.
Over the years, he has composed an iconography of domestic objects and interiors, urban panoramas and figures somewhere between man and insect. In his work there are no boundaries between drawing, engraving, painting, video animation and inner tube sculpture. The various languages condition and contaminate each other, creating a universe of stories, suggestions, dreams; a fiction in black and white.
“Luca Matti's artworks insistently demonstrate that nowadays - and, to tell the truth, already for quite some time - the naivety of the painting can no longer exist, there can be no visual sign free of historical experience. What we see in his artworks we have seen a thousand times before and our visual experience is reflected in it... That an artist has the courage to refer to a simple narrative language is also amazing because he does so without qualms, without caution, without sophisticated attitudes. The touching originality of these paintings dissolves into a labyrinth of déjà vu connotations and the viewer feels bewildered, irritated and at the same time also calm because he seems to find something narrative in them, something immediate and easy to understand. The obsessive repetitions, however, the monotonous reformulations in the still lives with a shadow/light effect, the human figures set in an impersonal, motorized and alienated urban environment, all this unmasks the apparent naivety and simplicity, that innocuous closeness to reality, and makes these visual stories fit perfectly into modern painting on the metropolitan myth and its typical narratological framework.” (Lorand Hegyi in Luca Matti. La poesia latente degli oggetti [Luca Matti. The latent poetry of objects], exhibition catalogue at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan 2004)
Geometries, rubber and absence of color are his hallmarks. Time and space his obsessions. Movement and man's tension to dominate space through urbanization and its torments, such as the artworks presented in the exhibition Babel (Frittelli arte contemporanea, curated by Sergio Risaliti, Florence, 2007), evidence of a world made of buildings that multiply almost to overwhelm man, a cementification that reduces his freedom. The exhibition declares emotion and vertigo but also and above all criticism of the widespread city and the figure of the architect as deus ex machina.
“So far I have worked a lot on the theme of movement and speed. Now I am fascinated by space. We build all the time, we give density to the space around us by enclosing it in rigid forms. I am devoting myself a lot to the representation of dense cities made of parallelepipeds, new Babelis in extension where the paradox is the density of presence which, taken to paroxysm, becomes absence instead. Where the endless City without solution of continuity becomes desert.”
Solo exhibitions at the Centro d'Arte Spaziotempo and the Massimo Carasi Gallery in Mantua in 1995 are worth mentioning. In 1998 at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. In 1999 at the Teatro Romano in Fiesole and in 2001 at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan. In 2004, together with Mark Kostabi, he exhibited at the Magazzini del Sale in Cervia and in 2005 he collaborated with the Balletto Teatro di Torino. In 2007, he inaugurated the above-mentioned Babele exhibition in the new Frittelli arte contemporanea gallery in Florence and in 2008 he collaborated with the Rossi Prodi Architetto studio on the winning project for the competition to renovate the former juvenile prison in Pesaro. In 2011 he won the Golfo della Spezia Painting Prize and the following year he inaugurated his personal exhibition Nuovimondi [New-worlds] at CAMeC in La Spezia.
Nuovimondi [New-worlds] is the natural evolution of a work that Luca Matti has been developing since the beginning of his career as an artist, documenting with a stubborn and acute sense of irony the dramatic aspect of a society in which the concept of enrichment through the cementing of our thoughts (see men with buildings on their heads) and our lands has prevailed, reducing more and more the spaces destined for the oxygenation of the environment indispensable to life. Today, oil companies, run by powerful organizations, are engaged in the most frantic and destructive search of the last hundred years, drilling land and seas, dividing continents and producing senseless pollution. In Nuovimondi [New-worlds], the artist uses bitumen, made from oil, to point the finger at what could represent the ultimate end of the world. Part graphics, part film, part drawing, part comics - strictly in black and white - Luca Matti's work is a new interpretation of the world à la Blade Runner in which man - swallowed up by the “city machine” - is continually evoked without ever appearing. Small windows - thickly dotting the urban agglomeration - replace him, the multitude of a humanity that is now grey and dull.
His nervous, almost expressionist line becomes an existential condition that without a change in man, from his disastrous goals, portends an apocalyptic dark universe.
The Institute of Italian Culture in Bratislava invited him to exhibit at the Slovak Ministry of Culture in 2012.
In 2016 he exhibited with Lucio Pozzi at the allerArt Bludenz gallery in Austria and opened the solo exhibition CityMood at Cappelleschi art gallery in Knokke, Belgium.
In 2017 he held the solo exhibition La città dentro [The city inside], at the ZetaEffe gallery in Florence, participated in the exhibition Arte e Technologia [Art and Technology] in the Lan Wan Art park museum in Qingdao, China, and created a large installation for the solo exhibition Supermondo [Super-world] at Maison Patrizia Pepe in Florence.
In 2018, he participated in the BoCs Art residency curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio and Giovanni Viceconte in Cosenza. In 2019 he held the solo exhibition Readers, at the Studio 38 Contemporary Art Gallery in Pistoia and participated in the exhibition Intreccio di radici [Weave of roots] at the Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence.
In June 2020 he opened the exhibition Profezie [Prophecies] per un mondo migliore, organized by the Italian Cultural Institute and the Embassy of Italy in Slovakia at the Kabinet Gallery in Bratislava. In December he participated in the exhibition Due Culture e lo Spazio [Two cultures and the space], 2nd Edition, at Qingdao Sculpture Art Museum.
In 2021 he inaugurated his solo exhibition Dalla terra alla luna [From the Earth to the Moon] at the C2 contemporanea space in Florence.
