Born on August 6, 1970, Giuseppe Mastromatteo has worked as an artist for more than a decade. After a period spent as a recordist assistant inside a record company, Mastromatteo graduated from Accademia di Comunicazione di Milano with a degree in art direction. He writes about the arts, teaches advertising at various significant academic institutions, and collaborates with the Triennale Museum of Milan in the role of art director.
Since 2005, Mastromatteo’s works have been exhibited at the Fabbrica Eos Art Gallery, Milan, as well as at national and international art fairs. He currently lives and works in New York.
The Inspiration Behind Giuseppe Mastromatteo’s Latest Work — “Indepensense” By Cyril Foiret, trendland.net
Giuseppe Mastromatteo’s portraits bring poetic Surrealism back to life. They could be collages, but take advantage of the subtlety of digital technology to reproduce humanity in impossible and illusory dimensions. Ripped faces, eyes and ears which run through hands, are the center of an imaginary truth that draws inspiration from the visions of Magritte and Man Ray to land inside a new visual synthesis with stylistic patterns representing the most contemporary photography of our time, in a continuous overlapping of visual languages that live in the world of advertising and genuine research.
Backgrounds are white, the light homogeneous: nothing averts the detailed expressions in the characters of this silent and fascinating theater of the absurd. Transfigured bodies, pierced and lacerated, do not show any form of violence, but instead pose solemnly in front of the photographer’s lens, beyond any suffering.
No expression exists in these faces; there is no tension, but rather a sense of timelessness that leaves us open to reflect on the uncertainty of this third millennium.
The observer’s eye is immediately attracted by the extravagance of these creatures, which produces a true sense of discomfort and uneasiness. Mastromatteo intervenes in the interior sense of beauty. The models he chooses for his images bring to the stage classic canons of harmony and equilibrium, creating a complex dialectic between fascination and repulsion.
From here, the evident sensation emerges of discovering oneself in front of a Pantheon, where every possibility of self identification is precluded. A universe unto itself is the object of aesthetic contemplation and intriguing reverence, magnified by the means with which this is all narrated, because photography continues to maintain a link with an indissoluble reality of facts.
The process of recognition inherent in portrait photography appears as something distant. Physiognomy comes to light only to recover the aesthetic detail of our time.
Reality and fiction appear as outdated ideas, with full attention focusing on memory. As a conclusion, in order to bring together feelings and fragments of this project, photography in itself seems not enough and becomes something more, transforming into a metaphor of itself, reaching the final objective of communicating through other forms and channels.