Bertolami Fine Art - Piazza Lovatelli 1, 00186 Roma
Presale AUCTION 333 – Photographs from important european collections Auction 333 – Photographs from important european collections
Friday 11 April 2025 hours 17:00 (UTC +01:00)
MATTEO BASILÉ Ofelia - The Saints are Coming - Last Act
C-print on aluminium and plexiglassCm 150 x 100 Unique in this format. Signed, dated and titled on the backExhibition “The Saints Are Coming - Last Act” at GalleriaEMMEOTTO, Rome, 2011Basilè's world is "an iconographic universe resolved betweentechnological mannerism and pictorial surrealism through aniconographic hybridization and a cultural contamination betweenEast and West" - Achille Bonito Oliva.The suggestions of the East coexist in fact with a deeprooting in Romanity.The search for harmony and balance between the masses and thechromatic agreements are distinctive elements of a research that pursuesbeauty as the ultimate goal, and with exoticism, becomes the absoluteprotagonist in images imbued with mysterious sensuality.A strong surrealist connotation characterizes the photographs oforiental characters lost in desolate landscapes, amongdistant architectures, dominated by livid and leaden skies.These calibrated iconographies live in surreal and virtual worldscreated digitally by moving from photographic imagesrealized with stagings like film sets; they shapethe real through fantasy, transported into a dreamlike dimension,out of time and beyond a precise and identifiable physical space:they are beautiful and restless and combine sacred andprofane, future and tradition, East and West.Saints, madmen, warriors, monstrous creatures, or archaic faceslike those captured in travels in Southeast Asia, where theItalian photographer finds new impulses to tell that mysterythat is typical of man's existence.
