A few years after his last appearance, Luca Matti (Florence, 1964) is once again exhibiting in Florence his works on paper and canvas, still characterized by the use of graphite drawing predominantly in black and white, and oil or acrylic paintings, always monochrome, that reproduce on a different scale and on other register the original matrix, which is always a drawing.

The exhibition will also feature a recently produced video and some previously unseen sculptures: atavistic or, on the contrary, pseudo-Renaissance modular structures, created using plastic tubes and inner tubes, in a drawn image that is always strictly black. 
The paintings, drawings, new technological narratives and constructivist installations will be set up in the various spaces of the gallery to construct a conceptual itinerary of extreme rigor and refined expressiveness, in which theatricality and iconicity work together to reinforce the communicative speed of the sign and the tools. All this reveals fascination, emotion, vertigo and criticism of the scattered city (planetary urbanization) and of the end of architectural history (the modern architect as deus ex machina). Fascination mixed with astonishment and terror, also rendered here by the series of portraits of famous architects that, like cameos in a visual encyclopaedia, flow with a magniloquent and spectral tone along the walls of the exhibition space.

This group of portraits specially selected for the Babel project is actually part of a larger work “in progress”. For some time now, Luca Matti has been redrawing the faces, known and less known, of the major architects and city builders of the 20th century and the year 2000. Luca Matti draws in an indirect way the portraits, because he relies on photographs taken from magazines, encyclopaedias or the web. This “coldness” is, however, perturbed by his usual graphite stroke and the use of monochrome, which simulates photography and actually etches those faces onto fine paper with a personal line. Matti restores vitality to the effigy with signs and shading that declare his love for certain modern (expressionistic) portraiture as for certain anthropological photography or for the great manner of Ingres and Holbein. They are all black and white effigies (a monochrome that tends towards brown, ashen, almost sepia tones) reminiscent of ancient busts, medallions of illustrious men such as those sported in the princely palaces of yesteryear, bas-reliefs of ashen faces, or the series of pseudo-scientific photographs taken in the first half of the 20th century by August Sander in Berlin. Those portrait-photos appeared in a catalogue entitled Antlitz der Zeit [The Face of Our Time] and which the author defined as “archetypal images”. Photo-portraits in which, together with detachment, transpire that nihilistic feeling well defined by Susan Sontag in her famous essay On Photography as characteristic of the crisis of the classical portrait, in which the face corresponded to a soul and a personal history.

On the back wall, a monumental canvas stands out as a true statement and dazebao. It is a monochrome of about twenty metres, which also generates the title of the exhibition: Babel. A sort of urban and architectural BIG BANG, at once a nightmare and an aerial reproduction of that state of things evolved to the point of paroxysm and occlusion of emptiness, an immanent manifestation of that culture of congestion that Rem Koolhaas powerfully and cynically analysed in Delirious New York. The global construction site re-imagined by Luca Matti, springs from an original point and extends artichoke-like towards every periphery of the universe, no more and no less than the process of divine creation, whose victory of light over darkness it recalls, or of a physical-astronomical evolutionary process, the passage from the nothingness of gaseous Chaos to the energy of Big Bang to the expansion of matter and light everywhere. Then, in this delirious urbanization of the planet, we discover the Babel of multitudes, the great infinite mobilization of the new tribal societies, the many politics of rebellious subjectivity that in the anthill oppose the EMPIRE and the end of HISTORY.

Here, delirious and hopeful, the multitudes move ever more fluid and compact in the interstitial alleys of this COSMO-URBAN where the BABELE of voices and languages, of stories and narratives, grows and multiplies endlessly. It is the individual then who tries to walk on the homologating world of imperialistic urbanization: it is his initiation, his extreme test that we recognize in the video proposed by the artist, with a dramatic script reminiscent of both Kafka and Borges, and with an anachronistic sign – as Rosalind Krauss would say - graphically close to the rapid and scratchy expressiveness of comic strips. In order to save himself from the empty or the full, and redeem himself from the undifferentiated oblivion of the diffused city and the universe of consumption, post-modern man must know how to jump over blocks of architecture and empty spaces, escaping the condition of anguish to which the omnipotent delirium of architecture in the age of IMPERO would condemn him.

The exhibition is curated by Sergio Risaliti.