Matteo Lollini – Q1 Art Competition – Artist Portfolio Magazine

• Artist Portfolio Magazine – Q1 Art Competition
• Matteo Lollini – Bologna, Italy

Drawing and painting have always given me a fruitful environment to explore ideas and try to understand things happening around me.
I got a degree in Media Studies at the University of Bologna, Italy, some years ago, presenting a dissertation in Semiotics and Advertisement. Beside being the method I chose for my researches, Semiotics revealed me its power as a toolkit, to improve my sensitivity in understanding the complexity of the world by a slow in-depth interpretation of visual, verbal and social textes. This is why I think this approach had such a big impact on me as a viewer and as an interpreter, and consequently as a painter. It made me expand my vision and gave me specialized impletents to arrange my ideas and impressions.
During my high school and college years, I had some important courses and experiences that improved my knowledge in this field and my artistic consciousness, but – as a painter – I am a self-taught person, and a “lonely person”: I mean, I love to experience painting in solitude. I need other people to share opinions, but then I prefer isolation to express my final point of you.
I have been an “artist” just once in my life, during my first (and only, in 2015) exhibit, in duet with another artist I felt very close with (not in terms of art techniques – she makes installations reusing every day life objects – but of sensitivity ad vision).

Since I started working, I have always dealt with communication: after various experiences in new media projects and video games, publishing houses and marketing offices, I am now social media and web content manager at Cineteca di Bologna, the film library and restoration laboratory in town.
This deep interest in communication and media reverberates through all my artistic production, both as my primary intention (to communicate, to express my perspective) and as the object of my visual works. I am interested in representing (a lack of) communication, critical thresholds, often as allegories (inter-cultural failures, life/death boundaries, “travel impressions” in far away countries, …), politics issues, marginalisation and loneliness. I usually resort to the “Error Aesthetics” to depict these failures in contact/dialogue/conversation/cultural meeting/… This often leads to “visual stumbles”, glitches (new media bugs, visually speaking), absurdity, polisemy.
Consequently my works are substantially figurative: they need to be anchored to reality to make it break down in a sort of contemporary surrealism. I love the tension between figurative context and over-geometrical composition: this conflict creates some sort of focal places, between 3 and 2D, where sometimes the key to interpretation lies.
Speaking of techniques, I usually use traditional tools such as acrylic and oil painting, on canvas or wood panel, MDF or chipboard supports, of various sizes.