Tree and fence, soft and hard, natural and manmade converge to create the image of a time when pure nature is almost inconceivable and pure thought elusive. They bear silent yet eloquent witness to ambiguity as the new basis of the world. There is no more here or there, no yesterday or tomorrow, nothing straight or curved; only a rampantly flourishing agglomeration of different sides, parts, ideas, times. Does the future really belong to the hybrid? Because the hybrid can adapt? Because it does not insist on the absolute? Because it marries thesis with antithesis? Because it weaves such a rich tapestry of nature and culture?
Not so very long ago, backyards were bisected or even divided into many sections by metal fences. Each house had its own clearly defined area for beating carpets, hanging out washing and for airing quilts and mattresses in the spring. Each house was separated with almost vicious sharpness from the neighbouring garden where exactly the same everyday routine went on. Boys would regularly rip their trousers and ruin their shoe-soles in this labyrinth of metal thorns. Rust has since gnawed away at the layers of paint that were applied over the years. The ground has subsided. The fence has lost its function – it has become quite literally unfounded. And so it hovers above the earth, suspended, seemingly without support; the layers of peeling paint tell of the care that was once taken to ward off time and the elements.
A compact image of striking symmetry: night-black with scattered patches of colour in the background, fronted by a T-shaped metal bar forming a central axis. Object and plane converge, as though anchored and welded together. Background, foreground and picture plane are like a cloak of iron, with the dark, round apertures of the metal bar as buttonholes. It is an image of total abstraction tempered only by the slight twist of the metal bar turning into the picture space, the trickle of rainwater and the scratches of colour.
An unidentified grey object thrusts its way into the pictorial space, packed in grey plastic and tied with a simple string; formless, illegible, but clearly gravitating downwards. Black night envelops the space like a curtain. But what is here the frame, what the content, and what the stage? Juxtaposed planes and areas dovetail: the packaged object is crumpled, its surface lines chronicling its past use, while the shading of the folds and the frame of action are provided by the darkness of night.
Wire mesh or netting spanned for some functional purpose – its wear and tear, its missing links and gaps and twists telling of frequent trespass – runs through the picture before our eyes, shoulder-high, filling the frame, like a safety-net for the gaze. Areas are defined, demarcated and overlapped with visible traces. Space and plane are as distinct from one another as polaroids or positives are from negatives. Torn nets and warped grids bear witness to rules transgressed – lost in the endlessness of nocturnal blackness.
A section of masonry, illuminated in the night, juts into the picture from the right, recognisable as a wall, though little else can be discerned, for the light almost burns away the history of the wall. Only a hint of green towards the upper edge counters the power of electricity. This reduction, this dazzling brightness, turns an everyday object and background into a stolen nocturnal memory of modernism, into a remembrance of the clarity and rationality of form and content.
The party is over. Withered dreams dangling in front of a road-sign. Drooping shreds of flaccid rubber are all that remain of the red, yellow, turquoise, purple and orange balloons that once floated in the air, bright and plump, held by a speckled string. Now they just hang there, forlorn and tattered, like splashes of colour seeping into the night: traces of play or celebration as the abstract expressionism of today, bracketed by a sign to the local riding stables and the yellow ellipse of a streetlamp.
Woody creepers, blue plastic bands and warm yellow pools of light, garlands of brightness entwined before a dark doorway, forming a free, unfettered scribble, tremulous as a Twombly, shivering and slithering and shooting across the dark face of the night. An imaginary edifice takes shape in front of the building: a structure of lines and knots, a sculpture dissolving in space. Created for evening, swallowed up by night. Conceived as a dream, exposed as froth, it will be obliterated by the grey light of dawn.
Silent mirrors, it seems, aligned on a yellow bar. They are not blind, and yet they lead into emptiness, into nothingness. We gaze into the forest and it does not return our gaze. Matt, dark, silent, only its frame and coordinates tell of the three directions, three perspectives, three lanes of traffic that it channels, guides and reflects by day. The last car disappears into the night; exit stage left. A few brief hours of silence descend before the cacophony of morning returns.
Space and speed are regulated here. The space of tomorrow, the speed of yesterday and now. Future space is staked out here, at yesterday’s rate; the wooden posts themselves tell of planning and completion at a snail’s pace. High up in the firmament of the highway code, the 80 speed limit sign shines like an urban moon: 80 km per hour, somewhere between pottering along and stepping on the gas. Geometry times velocity equals “Einstein on the road”. The expansion and curvature of home on its trajectory towards the overpass.
Pietro Mattioli makes his rounds at night, strolling around the block, through the neighbourhood, all within easy walking distance. Like a cat or a stray dog, he wanders past rows of houses, across squares and through backyards; without so much as a glance, he takes a flight of three steps in his stride, ducking the flowers that trail down to touch his hair, feeling his way along the fences and the wire netting. He seems to take no interest in what is to the left or right of him, above or below. He walks straight ahead, upright, photographing as he goes, in the direction of his gait and gaze. There are no twists or turns, no soaring architectural heights or plummeting depths, no exoticism of the night. Instead, “here I am and here I stand and this is what I see before me... when I light it with a flash, when I flash it up.” For the 250th of a second that the camera flash lights up, night turns to day; in the foreground, a red arrow on aluminium, a green plant, a dangling chain stand out against the blackness of night, taking the leading role in the scene, only to sink back again into the vapid grey of the night-time city. We become witnesses to these suddenly blossoming flowers of the night; we see the traces, the objects and the textures as they peer sleepily into the glaring light.
Pietro Mattioli strolls through his neighbourhood as Eugène Atget once strolled through Paris. Except that he does it at night and with a more modern camera. He wanders through the night like Brassaï, except that he is alone. He is not looking for the warmth and shelter of a cosy bar, nor yet for a shoulder to cry on. His eye is trained on the ordinary, the trivial, the banal, on the simple things that make up everyday life and nurture a sense of familiarity in those who (still) feel a sense of belonging amongst the time-worn buildings and forgotten detritus of the urban neighbourhood. God is in the detail, as Walter Benjamin once wrote: seeing and documenting the simple little things and the unassuming nooks and crannies, creates a legible, liveable realm filled with an air of home comfort. These are the things that Pietro Mattioli brings to light. He unearths them like a botanist, separating them from their surroundings. But he does not mount them on a sheet of white paper. Instead, he drags them into the cold light of the camera flash, isolating them against the black ground of night.
Objective and detached as his approach may be, the results are often strange, unfamiliar and surreal. The thickness of night palls the city, veiling things, sealing up the seeing eye of day. Edges lose their sharpness, and looking subsides into imagining and dreaming. The camera flash jolts things abruptly from their trance-like state, awakening them from their sleep, wrenching them out of context and highlighting them. Gates, walls, chains and tree-trunks are torn from their anchorage, their function negated by the harsh interplay of light and dark; they are unhinged from the system, transfigured and alienated. Ordinary objects that go almost unnoticed by day are transformed by night into strange configurations, into sculptures freighted with absurdity.
Pietro Mattioli wanders through the neighbourhood like a night watchman of the visual, peeping in here and there to check that all is well, reassuring the startled “children”, and continuing on his way through the familiar medley of empty road signs, imported pine trees, concrete prefab structures and immaculately trimmed hedges – through a nocturnal archaeology of the everyday, through the traces of a city that is both familiar and strange, both near and far: “2000 Light Years from Home”.