Matteo Boato - Home

AUTHOR'S TEXTS

Land and Water

Houses and squares, the foundation for social interaction, evoking an atmosphere that is intimate and yet at the same time open to dialogue and contact with the outside world: these form the conceptual essence of a large number works set in various Italian towns and cities, including Venice, Burano, Trento, Padua, Verona, Feltre, Milan, Riva del Garda, Bologna, Gubbio, Florence, Siena, Lucca, Pitigliano, Sorano, Loreto, Mantua, Vigevano and Parma. The first part of this website represents the final stage of a research project dating back to 1999 into historic urban centres, resulting in the sequences of paintings entitled "Dancing Houses", "Sky of Roofs" and "The Square". The aim of the research was to discover the soul of each town or city through close study of the houses, façades, doors and windows looking out onto its medieval heart. These buildings, impregnated with human moods, have preserved within the very fabric of their materials the stories and actions of the people who once lived there. They hark back to our roots, to an extremely fragile world that is in constant danger of disappearing. The use of the adjective "dancing" in the series "Dancing Houses" has not only joyful connotations, but can also refer to the macabre, as in the fascinating gothic frescoes in which Death appears in the midst of the festivities of knights and ladies, a reminder of the precarious nature of human existence. But these are above all houses "on the move", houses which long to fly, to dance their stories; houses that cling to the rock face and to time, like the tesserae of a refined mosaic.

This series of canvasses - which is still alive today, still being added to - is followed by other sequences of works set away from the towns, focussing instead on the open countryside, rural landscapes, small hamlets, isolated farmhouses and fishing villages, and bearing the titles "Sky of Fields", "Full Moon", "Earth" and "Water".

The website also contains a number of oil paintings belonging to a series entitled "Dreaming" which, like stills from a film, depict the intimacy of a couple at whose feet I have put extracts from Italian and foreign poetry, as if they were the captions in a poster. The playful intent here was to superimpose rationality and instinct, mind and body, in the same dimension, the same visual space.

Painting for me is like keeping a diary, a constant retelling of my life. I paint mostly on canvas or wood and, more recently, on pottery. I paint the things that appeal to me, that capture my imagination as I fly above the world in my vessel, I paint the things I love, as though I were writing my autobiography. Painting allows me to pursue dreams, to give life to the people and places I would like to touch, interact with. It is a simple and primary need for expression; a need to tell, to tell about myself. The series on historic centres and rural landscapes presents another trait: the presence-absence of people in the various canvasses. This is partly due to the fact that human stories are told exclusively through the use of colour, and partly due to the hope that in future man will truly deserve a place on this earth and will create a world which is happier, more hardworking, honest, clean, respectful and colourful.

I started painting as a child, and I am still a child in this respect. At the time, painting was, thanks to its technical simplicity, a good way of bringing to life solitary afternoons and long summers in the mountains. I still consider it the ideal form of expression for someone like me, because it takes shape in the here and now, emerging directly from within me, coming straight from the gut without any technical mediation which might filter or even condition the creative process. Moreover, the material support required is humble, but lasting. The "beauty" of painting lies in its power of communication, and I see a close connection between paintings and the universal nature of the message concealed behind the composition and the background colour. This is why, when I stand before a completed work that I consider emotionally positive, it gives me the feeling of déjà vu. For the observer, the canvas is a point of view, a window onto the world lying behind things and people. For me, the painter, it is a place in my mind; in fact it is my mind, my sky.

The Dancing Houses

Discover the town's soul, making the old and recent buildings come to life again, showing through their walls the thoughts, lives and dreams of the people who spent part of their existence inside them. Old centres as living entities dismantled and reconstructed, reinventing partially the order, houses which recover consciousness, as in a childish game, interweaving their destiny with the voices, ideas, sounds, ancient trades of their past and future inhabitants. On the canvas their sensations, smiles, emotions, hatreds and loves come joyfully alive. Houses rising, drooping, flowing, towering, clinging to the rock and to time, as if they were tesseras of a fragile and refined mosaic. They are houses on their way, wishing to fly, wishing to dance their history; houses which revolt because someone has emptied them of humanity, depriving them of their voice, their sounds, the thousand little crafts which made them alive, instead turning them into commodities, simple and cold objects of profit. Painting these buildings, these towns, is making them speak. It is giving voice, through colour and its materiality and texture, making clear the dialogue with the past, with the rationale behind their construction. The colours are the houses and our emotional states. They are the clash with time, the wind, which shakes the torpid mind, the feeble critical capacity. They are the renunciation of conformist gestures, of virtual images and projections, of sounds without soul, of non-communication, of the standardisation of ideas and consumption. They are music, they are the sun that gives us life and accompanies us throughout it.

The Circle

A person, who is looking for her identity, turning, growing longer, stretching, twisting, flying from the obviousness, merging dreams and projects, mixing whirly places, loves, caresses. A person that makes a complete tour around herself and finds herself again at the departure point, but with the certainty of the way followed. She seems to be trying to flee from her responsibilities, from herself, from her life; instead she is running after superimposed ideas, taking the pieces and composing hopes and principles. The colours represent her sensations, her emotive spheres, her personality aspects, her instincts, her body organs, her interpersonal relationships, the bio and psychophysics environment which surround her, which wrap her up, with which she is in a dynamic balance. Desire is part of this research, it becomes a point of view from which one can observe the world; but also a tape measure of emotions, dreams, dependencies. She wants to get rid of everything exterior. She wants to get rid of her conformed gestures, her social compatible masks, the virtual images and projections which cover her , which determine her relationship with the world outside. With time, everything has encrusted, has cemented, dirtying the mind and the body, making the dialogue with others impossible. She wants to get rid of the contortion of running, of exasperating, of delegating. Liberating herself of the synthetic perfumes, the sounds without soul, the no communication, the standardisation of ideas and consumes. As a consequence, she undresses trying to dissect her identity, to reach the warm that is in her intestine, that centre of energy under the umbilicus. The energy which makes moving the body and the mind, the contact point between soul and physic, between the levels of consciousness, the master of life that resides in all of us. And finally she gives birth to a new idea of herself, a new herself, a new world where one can be born and sprout again.