Mattia Pajè

BIO

Mattia Pajè

Mattia Pajè (Melzo, 1991)

Mattia Pajè studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna; five years of painting with Luca Caccioni ‘an open school, a fairly free zone of education where I was able to simultaneously pass through other painting courses, by Mundula, Pulini, Novali, Pellegrini, including an Erasmus at the Fine Arts University Mimar Sinan in Istanbul’. With a Steinerian path from kindergarten to high school, his is a method fundamentally based on the power of the science of the spirit on all that is invisible, intelligible, occult, as something to be experienced and experimented in life and work. ‘As a child, I experimented a lot, from sculpture to carpentry, and worked with many materials: clay, wood, wax, metal, sculpted various stones such as sandstone, learnt weaving of various kinds’. In this way, he acquired a multi-handedness that allows him to create many of his works on his own, except when it is necessary to use specialised techniques. In addition to manual dexterity, he has a strong planning and relational ability that leads him, with some friends, Marco Casella and Filippo Marzocchi, to open in 2016 the non-profit exhibition and debate space Gelateria sogni di ghiaccio, which he has been running on his own since 2019: ‘Here, too, the Steinerian approach returns, in which one is used to living with many different people with whom to confront and constantly share. It is also a generational issue, because young artistic practice had to find an outlet, and so spontaneously, as has happened in other cities, we opened a space born out of a necessity, that of exhibiting, but also of having older artists exhibit and see them work, as well as creating a space for local artists’. So Pajè is an all-round man of action, who does not miss the theory aspect, publishing, in 2022, a book entitled 1. Here he collects selected and revised images and texts from the last ten years of his notebooks, and includes six texts reflecting on the concept of truth, asked of as many people from very different cultural backgrounds: ‘in the past I believed a lot in truth, but then I gave up. Truth in the absolute sense does not exist, there is individual truth. It is an interesting debate, because everyone has a claim to truth, especially the media’. His writings and drawings are about a series of practices, recipes, things he learnt around, almost all of them related to self-care, centring, presence, states of consciousness without using substances but dreams, ‘My truth. However, Pajè says he is not interested in giving answers, but in extending the field of possibilities, ‘without the pretence of creating truths, but of taking them apart’. We can see this in the exhibition at Palazzo Vizzani in Bologna, curated, like the book, by Giovanni Rendina, which was born from a reflection on the last two years, in which he used sets from Mediaset studios. Places where illusory truths are fabricated, such as Striscia la notizia, Barbara D’Urso’s programmes, up to the puppet One from the 1990s programme Bim bum bam; the logos of network 4, Italia 1, not taken as ready-made, but reworked, rearranged in an almost landscape-like context in dialogue with the visual context of the new age movement; a series of magic-activating objects for self-care from the editorial world/social blogs online, self-made like orgonites… another claim to truth. ‘It was interesting to confront these worlds with the truth claim’.