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Santuario Tropical, Mattia Barbieri personal exhibition with a text by Helga Marsala. With this solo show of the Brescian artist, the Gallery sanctions his entry among the represented artists.

With outstanding technical ability and richness of elements, Mattia Barbieri's painting collects sediments of the collective imagination, the history of art, the popular culture, recombined in a new guise.

The pictorial elements, no matter if they belong to tradition or to the most extreme visual neologisms, are used as words that make up a grammatical code used by the artist to interact with painting as a language, through which everything is deconstructed, restructured and reread .

Santuario Tropical is a visual path between painting, sculpture and drawing, conceived by the artist as a channel of connection between heaven and earth that makes current the ancient need to find knowledge by placing itself in dialogue with the divine. Barbieri thus relates to the iconography of different traditions, eras and cultures, celebrating the theophany, reinterpreting it and reinventing it with a digital aesthetic. The flat and vibrant backgrounds, the tactile patterns, the stylization of signs are the characteristics of a pictorial practice conducted with rigor, grace and determination.

Mattia Barbieri's work develops through Painting, Sculpture and Drawing from which a hybrid language emerges with heterogeneous elements such as the tradition of the image, mythological narratives and digital aesthetics. Over the years, the research has been divided into series that in their singularity show the multifaceted traits of the work, paying close attention to both the semantic aspect of visual grammar and the iconographic apparatus. Mattia Barbieri is attracted to Sacred Painting, such as medieval icons, an aspect that emerges with particular relief from the recent years production which is characterized by its proximity to subjects of a spiritual nature. The exasperated physiognomies, often with grotesque features, are accompanied by metaphysical landscapes, a scenario in which the exceptional, the miracle, manifests itself. The artistic practice is therefore conceived as a territory in which to distort and force form and language, but above all it is the channel through which to open the portal to elsewhere.

Graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, since 2007 he has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In 2010 he participated in the Moscow Biennale at the Winzavod Contemporary Art Center; in 2012 he was the winner of the First Painting Prize of the Lissone Museum; during Expo Milano 2015 he collaborates with Progetto Città Ideale, exhibiting and curating a cycle of artistic events at the Sala delle Colonne of the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan; the solo shows at Pablo's birthday in New York are from 2017 and 2019. In 2020 he is among the winners of the Nocivelli award. He has participated in international awards and residencies and curatorial projects, and is an active member of the art magazine E IL TOPO. He is a teacher of painting at the Aldo Galli Academy of Fine Arts in Como. He lives and works between Milan and New York.