Words
Close. Not here.
When did you realize that the work you were pursuing could be your path?
When I was five, I wondered what lay beyond the forest. That was when I started running through the undergrowth to find out what I wanted to know. I came across a fence of white stone — the same stone I would later recognize in Dante’s description, in the Divine Comedy, of the landslide in the Lavini di Marco. That small adventure showed me the path my exploration would take: to cross spaces in order to reach their edges. It was a performative experience, because the fear and the courage of crossing that field made me understand that this border was only one of the infinite boundaries I would have to face.
What are the essential themes of your research?
I am fascinated by humanity as a whole. I am moved by intuitions that lead my work toward paradox, toward the unexplored, and toward the overcoming of duality as a reason for being in the world.
Strengths and challenges of your work and creative environment?
The strength of my work lies in being able, in this life, to carry out a journey of giving form to my intentions through art, and of bringing forward the intuitions I have matured over the course of existences. The challenges are only perceptions of our way of being in the world; in truth, they reflect the degree of attachment we have to the form we have taken on.
How do you relate to and see your work within the dynamics of contemporaneity?
I don’t think my work can be placed only within contemporaneity, understood as what lives in or belongs to the present. I consider myself a traditionalist, in the sense that tradition reveals itself as a state of continuity between past, present, and future. I prefer to think of my research as part of an unbroken path, without beginning or end — a long thread that connects several existences, mine and others’ — rather than seeing myself slotted, by fashion or by interest, into the context of those who read and interpret the contemporary.
What is your relationship with your native territory, Trentino, and how does this “origin” align with your research and the city where you currently live?
I love the places I come from: the valley and the mountains bathed in morning light. Their beauty surrounds me whenever I return, even for long stretches of time. But what fascinates me most is having been born in a border area — a place that separates two geographical regions and two cultures, and that is also a point of encounter, a zone of exchange between different ways of being and thinking. The condition of who I am, and of my artistic research — which divides and at the same time seeks to bring together different forms of thought — fits well with my Trentino origins, for precisely this reason.
The concept of the role between space and time
The contemporary forces us to interpret roles and wonder about them. The system of roles tends to break and in Matteo Peterlini’s pictures you can live the reflex of the present and of self being. Born in Rovereto in 1970, graduated in information technologies, in 1996 he founded Quantum, a company for services on visual communication. In 2001 he founded the study Matteo Peterlini Design for visual communication. It regards the multiplicity of communication and leads the artist to elaborate a particular attention to the role of the image. As he states, the relationship between man and his existences, his identity, his becoming represent a basis in his search, made by digital instruments.
In the project iotualtro, his database of passport photo which people donated willing aim to recreate new identities over the pre-existent ones. The picture is made by superposition of pixel on isolated lines which compose the photos and once recombined, they give a sense of instability and awe. We face a portrait and we’d like to recognise the person represented but his face is made of full and empty spots and it is actually impossible to recreate a whole picture. What we see instead, is a kind of short circuit which we can compare to the disturbed picture on a digital video. Such an imperfect vision only deceive us to recognise somebody we know but what we have here is paradoxical artificial relationship.
The illusion of the face is generated by an instrument, a machine and not by the sensitive gesture of a painting hand. Still, what we perceive seems a fragment wrapped by the time, nearly a fraction of an antique fresco which hides a secret identity. In the age of globalization we are suggested here to let us carried away by a variable representation, where my image is blended with yours and the other way round, where the mindful “I” is necessarily confused and obliged to become something different, not just other than us, but a perfect stranger, a different one.
Using pixels as a measuring unit
Using pixels as a measuring unit: in photographic works by Matteo Peterlini this is a very real conceptual element, a programmatic choice. Disjointed and recomposed in this manner, the images in his photographic series are the result of a calculating process tending to the infinite, in which the system used for combining the fragments is entrusted to chance and applied with an algebraic function.
Peterlini even dares envisaging original sin and focuses closely on the very mechanisms of perception in specially created specific types of software. How are images generated in our minds? chosen by imitation, learning and sharing, the mechanisms we usually use for understanding the world lose their effectiveness when faced with the associative flow generated by the electronic process. Hence, it does not seem to be a contradiction that these are traditional pictorial genres: portraits, nudes, landscapes.
In fact, thanks to the frontal aspect of the faces (those required for a standard passport photograph in Meyouother), the silhouettes of the bodies (those outlined in the six poses asked of the models in V6), the fixedness of landscapes that are almost abstract (Backscapes), it is possible to acknowledge the unconscious tendency to recognize what is “already known” (Gestalt, stereotypes) that usually allows us to address the diversity of phenomena. Furthermore, it is precisely the hoax provided by a technique that is only apparently “craftsman-like”, used by Peterlini to give life to his photographic series, that reveals the analytic nature of his work.
I was born in the countryside, in a place filled with greenery, blue skies, and colorful flowers, all accompanying my summer days. In winter, that field would fill with snow, becoming pure white; all colors subtracted, leaving a sheet that dazzled me in the sunlight as I contemplated it from my room window. Beyond that eastern meadow, there was a forest. It wasn’t populated by tall trees but rather dense shrubbery and medium-sized trees. The ground was a peculiar mix of soil, grass, leaves, and white stones—the same ones Dante mentioned in his Purgatory when he passed through that valley.
These white stones seemed placed in the forest like missing objects. They appeared light and ethereal at sight, but once held in hand, they became heavy and sharp-edged. One day, I pondered the boundaries of that forest, or rather, what lay beyond the forest. Perhaps that was my first day as an artist? I wanted to see where the limits were, hoping and presuming I could surpass them. Gathering courage, I decided to investigate what the new boundary would be when I touched the forest and…? So, I told myself I would run through that forest. The first step was a long jump with a run, and then off, running, running, running through the shrubs that clung to my clothes, as if someone wanted to send me back, and yet I moved forward.
Forward, and still forward, all running until… at a certain point, I saw behind 4 or maybe 5 shrubs a low, harmless wall, a wall outlining another area. Behind this wall, there was still more forest. I returned satisfied and disappointed. Satisfied because that journey into darkness was a bet I had overcome. Disappointed because I understood that this journey only gave me the certainty of living within an infinite quantity of borders containing other borders and borders within other borders, and so on.