Matteo Messori
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 5 min read
Matteo Messori is an Italian artist from Reggio Emilia, working between his hometown and Milan. He paints and creates installations, balancing between structure and fluidity. At the core of his work is the idea of the “Antiform,” a changing, receptive body that adapts to its surroundings. His approach to making is impulsive and experimental. Messori's works reflect the places where they’re made, whether in a city studio or during a desert residency, becoming part of those environments themselves.
Q: You describe “Antiforma” as something alive, open, and shifting. How do you recognize it when it appears in your work?
A: For me, the Antiform is a receptive element, capable of gathering and assimilating what surrounds me, both on an emotional and physical level. It changes its body according to the situation and the place where it manifests itself. It’s a catalyzing subject that lives through connotations, yet doesn’t truly belong to any of them. It can be organic and at the same time ephemeral. In a few words, it’s a formula I use to show, through the mutability of a symbol, the bodies and environments that come into contact with my life.
In my work, I recognize it not so much as a presence, but as the genesis of that presence, a shifting body that inhabits my research and represents the paradigm on which my artistic journey is founded.
Q: Your practice moves between painting and installation. What does one give you that the other can’t?
A: Returning to the concept of Antiform, it is precisely because of its mutability that I feel the need to give body and shape to different structures and compositions. Painting fills an absence that I cannot satisfy through sculpture, while sculpture creates a presence that I cannot find in painting.
Painting allows me to be frenetic, to make mistakes and repeat them, to experiment with unusual techniques and materials, even inventing new methods. Sculpture, on the other hand, requires a longer time of gestation, a kind of incubation before the work can take form.
I find it both amusing and deeply fitting that, in my practice, painting represents the immature act, eager to remain that way, while sculpture or installation embody a more conscious gesture, more responsible toward the material. It’s as if within me coexist the adult who never wants to grow up and the child who, with care and determination, strives to be seen as an adult in the eyes of others.
Q: You’ve spent time working in very different places — from Milan to the Błędów Desert. What changes in you when the landscape changes?
A: When the landscape changes, so does, as for many other artists, my way of conducting research. I like to define myself as a researcher, not so much for the need to produce something, but for the desire to understand and carry with me the knowledge of the place where I am.
In residencies, for instance, I prefer those that challenge both body and mind. In the Błędów Desert, I found myself within a community of very different personalities, where it was necessary to participate actively in daily tasks and in the collective’s sustenance. The goal was not so much to produce a work, but to live together, and through that unity, generate experiences and stories of every kind.
I believe that, in certain contexts, producing a work can even become superfluous. Mental mechanisms activate that prevent you from fully immersing yourself in the place, depriving you of possibilities and experiences that only time and presence can offer. Whether I am in Milan or in the middle of the desert, my priority is not to complete a work, but to fully live the place where I am. I know that, by maintaining this attitude, the work eventually emerges on its own, as a natural consequence of everything I have absorbed.
Q: You often look at nature as a mirror for human transformation. What kind of patterns do you keep noticing there?
A: I see nature as a body, a central and primordial entity we cannot live without. Its mutability directly influences our habits and behaviors. The relationship between nature and humanity is the result of a dialogue that is constantly born, grows, and dies, a cycle without pause or end. Amid this dizzying exchange of energies, art exists as a bridge, a channel of communication between the two sides. I think of Goethe, during his journey to Italy, wondering whether a pure dialogue between man, nature, and art could ever truly exist. At the moment, I am working on a personal project that investigates intimacy within our inner visceral sphere, exploring how sound can influence water and at the same time how water can influence sound, merging natural and human sounds. As we know, we are composed of about 70% water, just like the Earth.
This bond is not only existential but also fraternal: we are mirrors of one another. One could say that we live within a mirror that, in essence, is our father and mother, always present and alive within our existence.
Q: Some of your works feel like they come from observation, others from reaction. Do you see those as opposite states or part of the same flow?
A: For me, observation and reaction are two moments of the same breath. Observation is the time of listening, of suspension, when I let things happen and imprint themselves within me. Reaction, instead, is the body moving, responding to what it has absorbed. I don’t see these two states as opposites, but as two ends of the same vital flow. The work often arises precisely from this passage, from that invisible tension that forms between what I witness and what I undergo. It’s as if observation prepares the ground and reaction becomes its inevitable bloom. In the end, both are ways of being present, of existing within matter and within life.
Q: Collaboration seems to run through your path, from Neutro to residencies. What keeps you drawn to shared spaces for making?
A: Collaboration, for me, is a way of stepping outside myself, of letting go of control and accepting the unexpected as part of the process. In shared contexts, whether independent spaces like Neutro or collective residencies, a kind of energy emerges that I could never generate alone. What interests me is not only confrontation, but the fusion of languages, the way visions contaminate each other until they become something third, something autonomous.
A shared space is also a place of trust and listening: there you learn to let go of the idea of ownership over the work and to live it as a common organism, constantly transforming. Perhaps this is what draws me to it, the possibility of seeing art not as an individual gesture, but as a collective experience that grows through relation.
