Matteo Messori
Ikigai refers to the mental and spiritual circumstances under which individuals feel that their lives are valuable as they move forward towards their goals. Looking for your ikigai is the process of cultivating your inner potential as you actively pursue what you enjoy doing in service of your family and community.
Artist Matteo Messori processes his creative drive through this search for his personal ikigai, in relation to his family, his life experience and inner growth. In his recent production, he’s come to conceive the vision of a chrysalis: the remains of the mutation of a caterpillar to a butterfly, thus, metaphorically, the form tracing a liminal state of transition in quiescence. The threshold between him and the rest, to overcome a loss, for the sake of re- membrance and gestation of a reason for being. Ikigai may also be misused in capitalism and associated with the reach of happi- ness, achieving life goals, getting to the dream job or the material good aimed for, in a rush to always gain more and never stop de- siring something new – the very death of libido.
On the contrary, Messori internalizes the essence of the ikigai concept, reaching that awareness of one's existence that allows to build the strength from the body, inhabited as both a comfortable womb and a transitory place. Yet we have a denim-made tapestry painted in white to fix the invisibility of transmutation into a visual trace.
Through metaphors Messori investigates the human in a covert- ly autobiographical way. Similarly, the displayed shoulder pad and knee braces in denim speak of his drive to the abandonment of form, as in the case of the tapestry and the chrysalis, or through the fixation of it in a secondary layer as for the rugby equipment. Form and anti-form (which is form per se, divested of all functionality) compose Messori’s subjects of interest rendering a system of research based on his interest on manifestation of nature with its implicit disappearance or forthcoming cancella- tion. His works, like a metaphor, reflect the contemporary socie- tal discomfort shared within the ecological and social crisis.
words ILARIA SPONDA
More to read
