Biography, statement
Matteo Forli, Genova1981 - Lives and works in Italy
by Viana Conti
Revisiting the concept of the skeleton in painting, Matteo Forli (1981, Genova) lingers inside the visceral body, experienced as a seducing area of discovery, a material of unexhaustible creative drive.Subject matters of his paintings and gestural acts are in fact the bone structure and the body’s organs.Fascinated by body functions, during art classes at the Academy he focused his interest on the skeleton structure rather than on the life model.The artist doesn’t hesitate in thrusting his abstract talent into body interiors, inside the brownian motion of cells, so as to uncover their mistery and complexity, flexibility and stiffness, fluidity and suspension, spontaneous and conditioned reactivity.Forli’s artistic universe includes the possibility of human body hybridization with other species, drawing inspiration from the canadian director David Cronenberg “Canada”canadese whose films show an exacerbated realism in special effects, and from writers such as the gothic novelist Stephen King and the British James Graham Ballard, author of Crash.In his actions the themes of Mutation, infection and flesh contamination are intertwined with the psychological element, thus outlining more imaginative than dramatic scenarios.
The spirit which permeates his public experiences, either acted inside a museum or in solitude, inside warehouses or in abandoned or broken down structures, is that of the Street Art, the Art created in London by Bansky in theyear 2000 – albeit
already pioneered in Italy in the nineties – whose purpose was to take over, often illegally, (as it was for graffiti art) a street, a private property, a decayed wall, a town square, an abandoned warehouse.Motivations would change from author to
author, even though intentions are aimed at expressing one’s works, through spray paint, prints, templates, stencils, stickers and video-projections, in order to affirm, paradoxically, each one’s identity through anonymity.Matteo Forli however,
doesn’t resort to writing but to the gestural representation of an organic figurality associated with a sign abstraction. His motivation, conscious or unconscious, would seem that of recreating a dead zone through his field of intervention.The psychological approach to the matter he treats and the actions he designs is essential to penetrate his imagery.An imagery nurtured on splatter movies and the body-horror genre iconography, providing sarcastic rather than macabre, nocturnal rather than
tragic undertones and pairing with a frequently self composed audio work, punctuated by punk and psychedelic rock and sometimes New Wave incursions, whose origins are to be ascribed to the electronic music’s experimental style denominated Industrial noise, particularly related to Northern American authors such as William Burroughs and Philip Dick ; the artist also practices the scratching technique like a dj or a virtual vj.Committed to a sort of Metropolitan Actionism, Matteo Forli
acts as if he were in trance, releasing his hands movements upon public stimulation. Dressed in black, a mobile shadow figure, he steps into the projection screen he’s working on.
His hand gesture remains still and firm albeit receptive to any suggestion and impulse, either external or internal.His hand movement, while absorbed in sketching wide and elegant graphics, a sheaf of black marks or tangled organs, is being pulsed and scanned on the side wall projections by the rythms of an heart or a placenta.His Anatomic Stylism process stems from the Anatomy Book from which he pulls out stomach, heart and liver, placing them on canvas or other frame supports, eventually moving on to hands, limbs and their layers.The artist seizes a person’s radiography and insert himself in it, heading for a visionary trip and living an experience of familiarity and estrangement which strenghtens his sign’s motivation.Matteo Forli has always been attracted to organic molecules, wherein genetic information resides.His latest works fall within his “from extraterrestrial to inner space” voyage experience, performed for the “Artrè” Bruna Solinas Contemporary Art Gallery, Genoa, a trenchant personal exhibition, representative of all his ideational, composite, materic and imaginative scenario.Documented by images and texts of the present exhaustive catalogue, the exhibition is structured on six great canvases, titled “Untitled”, performed with a mixed technique on a serigraphic screen – a few of them carrying a visual memory of the gestural force of Emilio Scanavino’s tangles – followed by five works of numbered Fossils, treated with sand, flatting, spray paint and black enamel paint on prepared canvas, a bunch of anatomical sketches made with crayon, china and marker pen, three X-ray plates treated with serigraphic interventions focusing on identity research and some still frames taken out of videos reffering to the artist riveting live performances.Matteo Forli doesn’t favour only disused structures, abandoned warehouses, but story of life samples, geological formations such as fossils.
The artist is mesmerized by the shape, the prints and the signs time left on these long time dead organisms which had been pure energy and that once buried, before decaying process started turned into sediments like sand or mud, and, carried away by the water, they laid down on the ocean floor, thus transferring throughout the centuries from the Biosphere into the Lithosphere,from life to stone.This passage to another modality of existence fascinates the artist and coax him into to rethinking in his works the terms of a transformation, of a powerful and unrelenting metamorphosis of the matter.Under the effects of this suggestion the artist pictorially reproduces the earth crust, the sedimentary rocks, the lava flows and the ashes, captating the vestigial presences arising from his imaginal world.Matteo Forli blends an academic formation – which links him, as far his sign is concerned, to Secessionism and Viennese Actionism – together with a multimedial performing attitude.The resulting match is original indeed, since on the one hand we can perceive the quality of an historical depth and a natural talent in sketching signs and graphs on wide surfaces, while on the other we can clearly recognize his orientation choice in the audio-visual action field.His tool arsenal comprise black enamel, pens, square leads, chalks, transparent flatting and spray paint, employed to soften and dim the brush raw imprinting.On the vernissage day during a video projection which will embed the artist in action the observer would perceive the artwork as the becoming of a mutant being.The days that follow a monitor or a recorded video will stay put in a loop repeating the event.On the graphic arts domain pertaining the engraving of plexiglass the artist performs an experimentation of his own employing serigraphic screens.The anatomic interiors, structured upon faint tracing graphisms and hairy filaments, are treated like a vegetal, floral world, where muscular sheafs and tendon sheaths show the venations of a petal, a stem or a corolla.A few paintings on canvas forex and metal display an evanescent subject radiating a ghostly light, pointing out to a body radiography promptly seized by the artist, intervening with fluid passages of nervous terminations tremors.Drawing organic shapes, his hand transliterate the mind’s electric impulses, the heart beat fibrillations, the neuronal excitations and inhibitions of the muscular system.Once the body’s organs are everted, they are visionarily inserted into an alien space where anything can happen, injecting a state of tension into the artwork and in the observer.Memories of art history, contemporary sound, filmic scenarios, emerge from his imaginery, while un uninterrupted emotional wave runs throughout his artwork, imprinting a para-narrative rythm.The organs elaborated by Matteo Forli are fragments of a sleeping giant who could suddenly awake, leaving the screen with a robot strutting.
Matteo Forli
Artysm.com