Born in Italy in 1985, Mattia Mognetti graduated in Clinical Psychology and Neuroscience, and is passionate about art. In 2010 he began to apply his creativity and experience in fine art to photography and digital arts. His research, strongly influenced by his studies, focuses on experimenting with the perceptive reality, a border between the concrete and the abstract. He lives and work in Milan.
“In 2010 I began to ride my congenital attraction for architecture: its huge volumes and gigantism, its shapes and textures… Fascinated by perspective I was taking photographs without fully understanding what my attention was being attracted too, what I was trying to represent with a shot and subsequent post-production. Photography was an opportunity to take a fragment of reality and give it a meaning, but also, conversely, as an expedient to let a significance take possession of reality to bring out himself. The contrast between these two visions became the source of my own reflections. Slowly I realized that psychology was an integral part of my creative experience. That I was not trying to represent architecture, but to use a photograph as way to strike and confuse my perceptive system. Therefore I started producing the first works that were later to be structured in the “Istigkeit” series…
While creating these images i realized that i was getting ever closer to the idea which was guiding me. Trying to invalidate the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in the conceptualization of a given entity by our brains. At first sight each work in the “Istigkeit” series seems different from what it is; and what it is, is not always visible, or at least not clear and obvious. Volumes are artificially combined in the shadows and give rise to solids whose meticulous analysis reveals their illusory value. You follow a surface which then splits. You focus on walls and windows, but these interact and merge into conflicting objects and paradoxical perspectives. The sight is lost in the complexity of textures, intersections and overlays. Nothing is what it is and everything is what it seems. And sometimes, during the perception of what it seems, inside the mental mechanisms that lead to the interpretation of any given scenario, it’s possible your Ego cannot impose itself on a more primitive interpretation, rooted both in individual, collective, cultural and archetypal symbolic components…”
