Matteo Negri is an artist who has consistently stayed true to his vocation, driven by grand visions that require immense dedication and time. Perhaps it’s also the ever-shifting world around him – charged constantly with events that move him deeply, that fuel his artistic journey. Marina Mojana recognized this quality as early as 2002, describing his fascination with motors and engines. In the years since, Negri’s focus has evolved to include Legos, slower sculptures and bold experiments in form, revealing a persistent interplay of geometries, colors, and reflective surfaces that always absorb the world around them. Installations like Johnny “il polipo” and Frankie “la gru” (2004), Piano Piano (2016), Greetings from Mars (2018), and Meanwhile (2022) exemplify this energy. However, recently, as he enters his 40s, a notable shift has emerged in his work – a deliberate deceleration, where turbulent times have made his output more selective. This introspective period, which also marks more than two decades in the art world, gave rise to his latest series, False Flag. Conceived with geometric precision and a refined visual language, these flags challenge traditional boundaries, presenting gradient edges and iridescent colors to reflect a political commitment untethered from nationalism. The material with which he creates the flags, however, voluntarily remains the same as that of national flags, provoking a sense of disorientation in the viewer.
Matteo Negri, “Meanwhile” series. View of the artist’s studio in Cormano, Italy. Aluminium, acrylic, adhesive films, epoxy finish. Cm 180 x 180 x 10 cm each. Courtesy for the image the Artist’s archive and Smolka Gallery, AT and © E.Datrino 2024
Erka Shalari: I was wondering how has been your last months. What have you been focused lately?
Matteo Negri: I’ve been in the mountains. Read, walk, read, walk. I needed to have a break. It’s a strange world. The more I try to understand it, the more complicated it gets. There’s this quote by Guardini[1] that’s been on my mind all summer. «I’m just a man – husband, father, artist – nothing more». You know, we have wars around us, so close to home. Children dying, friends, neighbours. You wonder: where’s the hope? How do I build a leg-acy and what kind of world am I leaving for my daughters? Che fare!?[2] What can we do?
I don’t know, it’s a mix of ideas, work and life moments, things that no one is prepared for. I wanted to ask you, since in almost all the calls you are al-ways working in the studio, what is your workday like?
For me, there’s always this blank space between myself and the world. Each morning begins with that blank space, and as an artist, it becomes something tangible, a color, maybe yellow fading into blu[3]. Since 2017, I’ve been working on these geometric drawings. They started as traces of landscapes, reflecting an idea that art could offer an endless view. The way I use mirrors, ground-level perspective, color schemes mixed with lines, and the spaces they create in my aluminum works – that’s what I explored in the solo shows Meanwhile (05 – 16/10/2022) in Vienna at Aa Collections. The mirroring artwork represents the idea of the work’s transcendence, of the ever-changing image that draws the external world inward.
Matteo Negri, “False Flags”, nautical fabric, steel. Environmental installation, dimensions variable. Installation view at Gate 44, Milan. December 2023. Courtesy for the image the Artist’s archive © L. Casonato 2023
What happened after that? It’s interesting how your geometries seem to leave the canvas, transforming into installations, sculptures, and even flags (I’m not sure that’s the right word).
I’ve come to realize the importance of a simple yet structured gesture: drawing. I looked at the lines, gradients, and they started to resemble flags – colors side by side, colliding until they find balance. People are like that, too. I also revisited some of the great masters, like Barnett Newman. In an interview I read recently, Newman said something that struck me. He mentioned that his paintings, which I always thought were purely abstract, actually assert freedom. He said: «If understood correctly, they would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism[4]». It was like a switch flipped in my mind, and flags became this recurring image in my work.
I know you as a sculptor, but it seems that your research is moving in other directions. Your latest works seem to underline the topic of time.
As a visual artist primarily focused on sculpture, I have been exploring the boundaries and limits between materials and perception for several years, with a particular focus on the perceptual roles of physical and sensory limits in sculp-ture. It was during my recent research on the geometric construction of space in relation to the use of iridescent and reflective materials that I developed some works with sharp, bold edges and a distinctly changeable nature. When the aluminium works start working, they seem like a compelling metaphor for capturing multiple layers of reality at once, I mean I was doing those works very reflective, and the images all around the world were filled into them. It was in 2022 when I start thinking about my work in relation with time. That was the line also for the other show in Vienna at Smolka, Frequency (6/055 – 7/06/2023). There was also the first time I ever show my drawings.
Matteo Negri, “False Flag 49.24”, monotype silkscreen on Laurier Fleur de Coton 250 gr paper with mixed media interventions, 76 x112 cm, 2024. Unique Exemplar. Courtesy for the image the Artist’s archive © E. Datrino ‘24
You say for Newman, behind what you thought was abstract, there was freedom. So is there a kind of “call to freedom” in your production? It seems to me that you move on the boundaries, trying to push limits.
I was drawing while listening to a podcast, and all I kept hearing was ‘war, war, war’. Then, all of a sudden, I realized that my drawings resembled flags. In that moment, I felt connected – in a way – with others, with the world. And I loved that feeling. Without beating around the bush, they’ve stood in the way of thought and are fighting against the ‘global failure of modernity’[5]. I create new flags, not tied to nations but representing states of necessity: contrasting colors placed side by side, adjacencies and overlaps, blurs and unclear edges, undefined registers. I then decided to photograph and print these images on nautical fabric, the same used for flags. Then I created an installation and an artist book entitled “False Flag” with Marco Balzano.
A drawing for a political synthesis, is a work in progress in the work in progress?
I imagine people free, without suffering, fighting for the identity and for them, you know flags have had – in their construction – a lot of changes, instead to respond to people request and movement. But nowadays many flags are used in bad context, to stop freedom voices, that’s bad. Democracy is a working progress because it’s related to people needs. I want to describe this turbulence.
Matteo Negri,“False Flag 27.24”, monotype silkscreen on Laurier Fleur de Coton 250 gr paper with mixed media interventions, 76 x 112 cm, 2024. Unique Exemplar. Courtesy for the image the Artist’s archive © E.Datrino 2024
It seems that, from a point of view, your works run much more on visual grammar, on a kind of language, more than before on single materials precious.
It’s, in a way , something that is in the work, I don’t need everyday to create a something special, just find a good way and simple to speak using clear grammar, lines, gradient, there is a possibility to create a great discussion on a line, by the way sculpture is just “a line in space[6]”. And also I’m really bored to mega – giga -artworks, if they are not necessary. We must never forget that never as nowadays the “Law of Inverse Cost and Quality”[7] is so true.
Info:
[1] Romano Guardini, “Das Ende der Neuzeit. Ein Versuch zur Orientierung Die Macht. Versuch einer Wegweisen”, Editrice Morcelliana, Brescia 1955: «The only measure with which one can validly judge an era is the knowledge to what extent human existence has developed in its fullness, reaching, ac-cording to its own particularities and possibilities, to its true meaning».
[2] Referred artwork “che fare!” by Mario Merz, wax and fluorescent tube in metal container, 1968, Torino CRT.
[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Colour”, Oxford: Blackwell, 1977, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and trans. Linda Schättle. “Study on” n.27: «I seem to notice a logically important thing: if you define green as a color intermediate between blue and yellow, then you must also be able to say, for example, what a yellow slightly tending toward blue or a blue vaguely tending toward yellow is. And these expressions don’t tell me anything at all. But couldn’t they tell someone else something? So if someone describes the color of a wall to me as “a yellow tending toward red”, I understand that from a certain number of samples I could choose one that comes fairly close to the right one. But if someone were to describe a color by calling it a yel-low slightly tending toward blue, I couldn’t show it to him on a sample. Here it is customary to say that in one case one could imagine the color and in the other not, but this expression is misleading, because here it is not necessary to think of an image emerging into the mind’s eye».
[4] John P. O’Neill, “Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews”, Alfred A. Knopf, New York USA 1990, p. 251.
[5] N. Bourriaud, “Relational Aesthetics”, Paperback, 1998.
[6] “David Smith: The Collected Writings”, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA, 1974.
[7] Foster Wallace, D. (2012). “The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2”. In “Foster Wal-lace, D. Both Flesh and Not: Essays”, Little, Brown and Company, pp. 177-192. «…and thus yields the two most important corollary formulations of the Inverse Cost and Quality Law: (icql(a)) The more lavish and spectacular a movie’s special effects, the shittier that movie is going to be in all non-f/x respects».
Erka Shalari is a Vienna based art writer and editor. Her work is committed to uncovering distinctive artistic positions in contemporary art. The work methodology is strongly influenced by psychology, epistemological works, as well as affects and rituals.
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