Mario Matera

MARIO MATERA is an Italian contemporary artist born in 1968. Drawn to visual creation from an early age, he began painting as a teenager before exploring illustration, graphic design, photography and moving images. This multidisciplinary background has profoundly shaped his artistic practice, resulting in a visual language in which material, gesture and the construction and deconstruction of the image play a central role.

Matera describes his current practice as contemporary expressionism. Through layers, erasures, scraping and repeated interventions on the surface, he builds compositions in which the image constantly seems to emerge and disappear. The painted surface becomes a space of transformation, marked by fractures, traces and contrasting gestures that give each work a strong physical presence.

Portraiture has become particularly important within his recent work. In the CHAOS series, faces appear fragmented and reconstructed through paint and material. Highly detailed areas coexist with freer passages in which the figure seems to dissolve, creating portraits that are simultaneously recognizable and unstable. This tension between control and spontaneity reflects a broader exploration of identity and the complexity of human experience.

In the GOLDEN series, Matera extends this investigation through the philosophy of kintsugi, the Japanese practice of emphasizing an object's fractures rather than hiding them. Cracks and scars become part of its history and beauty. Transposed onto the human figure, this principle becomes a metaphor for resilience, memory and the ability to rebuild oneself through experience.

Matera works notably with mixed media on aluminium and rigid panels, surfaces that allow him to develop complex layers, contrasts and direct interventions into the material. His recent paintings continue to move between figuration and abstraction, precision and accident, classical beauty and contemporary fragmentation.

Through an instantly recognizable body of work, Mario Matera transforms portraiture into a space for inner exploration. Rather than simply representing an individual, his faces convey tension, memory and emotional states, revealing the beauty that can emerge from disorder, vulnerability and transformation.

Discover Mario Matera’s artworks available at Galerie De Medicis, Place des Vosges in Paris, and explore his contemporary paintings combining portraiture, material, fragmentation and emotion. The gallery currently presents several works from his CHAOS series.