Matteo Palmieri was born in 1986 and graduated in Agricultural and Land Sciences at Università Politecnica delle Marche in 2012 pursuing his PhD in Agronomy in 2017.
During the course of studies, he approaches the discipline of photography gradually outlining his photographic poetics that is the constant search for an environmental dialogue with everything that is photographed.
In 2012 a shot was selected by Diesel (55DSL) for the “10.55” project, a limited edition collection of t-shirts born with the collaboration of several international artists. In 2014 he presented his first solo exhibition entitled “Sintesi” at the Palazzo Ducale in Camerino: a series of portraits that summarize the first years of photographic activity. In 2016 he took part in a group exhibition at the Art Tiber Gallery in Rome. In 2017 he completed his project “Helichrysum”: a botanical-photographic herbarium that seeks a balance between nature and the human being through the use of plants collected and dried with scientific method and portraits of subjects surrounded by nature. The project is presented at the “Duma” gallery in Macerata and was shortlisted at the first edition of “Riaperture Festival” in Ferrara, with Mustafa Sabbagh as president of the jury.
He is currently working on his latest photographic-territorial-documentary project about the places and people of nineteenth-century sharecropping society in the Macerata hinterland.
About ‘Mirrors’ – words by Matteo Palmieri:
Observing oneself becomes a chimeric experience when we do not recognize the other one in front of us. Seeing one’s reflection involves the loss of the real perception of one’s self. There is the conception of the stranger, the emergence of a new figure that is perceived as a double.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, deals with the theme of double and multiplication by making an almost obsessive reference to the element of the mirror: “mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they multiply and propagate the number of men” is just one of many references between the pages of his stories and poems.
Based on the Borgesian symbolist imagery, this photographic project investigates the meaning of the illusory nature of being, the sensation of loss of balance deriving from it and the possibility of recover oneself. Is it possible to annihilate one’s double and find the own identity through your own reflection?
