TANGO FOR THE SHADOW, Studio Maraniello, Milan

The works on display are metadiegetical narratives on the practice of painting. Some sort of mise-en-abyme comes about, where no image that is self-reflected, but there is the painting that delves into itself. Mattia Barbieri is not interested in creating referential works, at most, the pictorial subject is eliminated by staging the theme par excellence, himself. Thus he arrives at the big three self-portraits (oil and spray on the wood) exhibited here, where the self that investigates on its own practice looks at itself in the mirror and that becomes the work, creating another self with which to dialogue, pictorially. It is not by chance that the height of the three oils is such as to allow Barbieri to create an immediate visual contact with the alter ego.

Self-portraits, as the two small landscapes in the exhibition, are created through an inter-medial research between painting, sculpture and digital graphics. It is possible to notice, the evidence, a virtual aspect that makes it look like this painting of a screen in which we see the pictures, although these are at the same time three-dimensional. The shape of the three- paintings on the walls in fact shows a spatiality in which painting is embodied, almost like a dermis of a compact sculpture. The size, the material and the shape of the support have a profound effect on the works. It is evident in the cylindrical painting exhibited in the show, or in the palm trunk, engraved by the artist and made, at the same time, sculpture and pictorial support. Moreover here, it is recognized the homology between signifier and signified (the wood work representing the palm is the same which is the tree in nature), in a trompe-l’oeil effect already present in previous productions as in Pitture domestiche.

Under the tree, then, there are the ripe fruits fallen to the ground. A piece of paper, a rout box, a faux coral in wood, a packing element of the spray, a woody yellow object, and another three self-portraits. One is engraved on a river pearl, in which the eyes are filled with lead; the second is derived from the wooden handle of a box cutter; the last from a piece of wood and then painted yellow. Memorabilia are symbolic, almost esoteric references to ourselves and the other from oneself.

The esotericism, on the other hand, is gathered throughout the exhibition, in shapes, colors, in the pictorial auto-diegesis, until the title: Tango for the shadow is both an ironic play of words and an hermetic, occult citation. The exhibition is a sensual dance, of cautious approach, done in the vicinity and in the honor of the shadow, but to get away from it. It is important not to forget that every portrait has in itself one of the strongest symbols of religious and cultural history of the east, a sign of clairvoyance and lighting: the third eye. The exhibition, on the other hand, is not a continuous return beyond the ordinary vision? Beyond painting, sculpture, form, content?

installation view