Matteo Negri, A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again

A web of lines, a kind of abstract naturalism combined with the graphic description of a childish drawing. Spontaneous germinations in a scrap metal garden, a mass of old machineries, electric wires, broken valves. Bundles of overlapping signs, perhaps meetings between the "black" culture emerging from the underground and the "white" information, which progresses through gradual removals. Blurred, uncertain dimensions...

"From the inside to the outside through an explosion", 2013 Milovan Farronato

The title of the exhibition Asupposedly fun thing I'll never do again quotes the corrosive reportage by David Foster Wallace about a week he spent on an extra-luxury cruise ship, describing the typology of the average American man's holydays in the Caribbean. In the work by Matteo Negri (born in San Donato Milanese, 1982), which goes from sculpture to art installations, objects, relieves, photography and scenography, there is an undeniable playful component, together with an intense thinking of the human subject from childhood to the adult age. The Danish game LEGO, universally recognized by its own small bricks, becomes the modular - minimal element of his work, from which the hazards of his research move into space, shapes, chromatic relations, interactions with internal and external environments. His research forces in the beginning and subverts later the rules of the game and, working plastically over the shape and the structure, through his own ways of choosing and melting the substance and altering the primary colors into secondaries and tertiaries, he opens a building modality overlooking the void and the no-limit between concept, project and execution. He constantly refers to the terraqueous globe starting from the interior world, not only on a psychic level, but also on a genetic and molecular level, and his own aestetic choices are related to the history of art. His graduation thesis about the English sculptor Tony Cragg and his research on the work of the artist Sol LeWitt, though with their own differences, had a considerable weight on his artistic education, together with the geometric and harmonious bars, based on the reds, blues, yellows and blacks by Piet Mondrian, and the maps and planispheres by Alighiero e Boetti, where the world nations are rappresented with the flags colors. The playing possibilities for a child during his educational phase become, in adulthood, a challenge to the plans decided elsewhere by other people, to gain a self-awareness and to look for and realize his identity in a social, political and cultural context, where he can analyze his own projections into the world and his own practical, theoretical and emotional investments in art. There is a linguistic assonance, on a phonetical - scriptural level, between the LEGO brand and L'Ego (the Ego) as a psychic structure based on the relationship with reality and the other from himself. As it happens with the playful and constructive components of LEGO, they can change sign in the project of the artist. They become a condition of risk and invasion, the same as with those deep mines, whose plastic side interested so much the artist's imaginary, which, out of his studio - laboratory, are not death tools anymore, but explosions of life.

CONTENT:

Introduction of Antonio Borghese, Head Consultant & Curator

Introduction of Carla Sibilla, Municipal Councillor for Culture and Tourism, City of GenoaI

Introduction of Alberto Pandolfo,  Councilman of the city of Genoa

Sceneries from a NeoPop imaginary, by Viana Conti

From the inside to the outside through an explosion, by Milovan Farronato

The macro sculptures by Matteo Negri, by Carlo Berio

I want to buy that Lego. That one. I've got the money, by Gerardo Bonom

Drawing into space, by Luca Fiore

Biography