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UNO* The Full Frontal, Dimora Artica, Milan – solo show

The new season of Dimora Artica opens on September 13, 2016 with the exhibition of Mattia Barbieri (1985, Brescia) entitled UNO – the full frontal.
The exhibition is included in the collaboration between Dimora Artica and Galleria Arrivada, in a synergy that comes from respect and the common commitment to the promotion of contemporary art.

Born from a reflection on the concept of all-encompassing unity in myths about the return to the origin, Mattia Barbieri’s project develops the idea of ​​Full Frontal, a dimension in which every sign is deconstructed and contaminated by the opposite sign that is superimposed on the wooden surface by creating one concentrated space-time, in which coalesce a multitude of images ranging from personal experiences to popular culture, from the pictorial experimentation to art history, from traditional craftsmanship to the digital language.
The heterogeneous and increasingly abundant visual material of contemporary life is metabolized by the artist in compositions that are intended to provide a summary, in a space that brings together frontally several perceptual dimensions.

The exhibition is installed along the two levels of exhibition space, with sculptures and paintings in a symbolic relation of spatial mirroring.
The sculptures were created by combining buffalo horns, small human figures in bronze and brass elements. The sculpture placed on the ground floor features a male figure of primitive appearance that seems caught in the act of climbing vertically through a body of indefinite shape. The sculptural ensemble is suspended and connected to the ceiling through a long brass rod that draws a thin vertical line in space. In the mezzanine, verticality flips into horizontality, with a sculpture in which a phallic shape faces a female figure. As in the representations of Alchemy, the masculine and feminine polarities are described by Barbieri in their mirroring opposition, psychic forces to be integrated into consciousness to rebuild the unity of the self.
In the paintings, the reflection on the One becomes less introspective and symbolic to focus on the pictorial language and perception of images and time in a contemporaneity strongly characterized by digital communication.

The hierarchy between central subject and the background, typical of classical painting, is dissolved in a pictorial surface that receives the most diverse iconography and that, rotating the painting can continue to be enjoyed without losing the compositional balance. In the vision of the image, no detail draws back but each fragment advances frontally without overshadowing.
Understood by Barbieri as screens of electronic devices, the paintings take on additional value related to the vision of painting as a support for a writing that records a reality that is constantly changing.
As described in the documentality theory of Maurizio Ferraris, the social reality consists primarily of inscriptions without which acts wouldn’t become social objects, which today are multiplying thanks to the diffusion of media such as computers and smartphones. As an inscription, even painting is a social object that keeps track of actions, but it produces something peculiar, a reflexive movement that leads us to stop to mirror oneself from within. An operation that Mattia Barbieri assimilated to the production and sharing of selfies, for which to paint is to reflect oneself in the  painting and at the same time production of a social object.
Linear time is recorded by the pictorial gaze and transformed in an act that transcends past and present in the essential unity of human action.

installation view

"paesaggio con ermes e argo", 33 x 40 cm, oil and spray on wood

"uno" 300 x 8 x 6 cm, animal horn and bronze

"uno" 300 x 8 x 6 cm, animal horn and bronze

installation view

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