AI arrives after thirty years of digital images
Matteo Basilè does not encounter artificial intelligence as a recent shortcut. Born in 1974 and active in Rome, he has worked since the mid-1990s on the relationship between photography, digital manipulation, identity and staged composition. AI therefore enters an already established grammar: it does not invent his world, but changes its possibilities.
In his work, the point is not to demonstrate that a machine can produce a plausible face, but to understand what happens to portraiture when the body, photographic archive, painting, code and memory cease to have clear boundaries.
From technological Mannerism to the post-human
Achille Bonito Oliva has described his practice as a technological Mannerism infused with painterly Surrealism. Solemn poses, meticulous details, ambiguous anatomies and spaces belonging to different eras produce dense images, far removed from the impersonal polish of much generative production.
Four years in Southeast Asia strengthened the tension between East and West, sacred and profane, myth and matter. Basilè’s post-human is not cold science fiction: it is a ritual, sensual and unstable body, continuously rewritten by the image.
Floramagnifica: training a genealogy
Floramagnifica imagines a female DNA running through twenty-one ideal generations. The artist states that he trained artificial intelligence to produce portraits in which botanical elements, physiognomies and echoes of Flemish painting form a genealogy that does not exist, yet remains visually coherent.
AI does not replace photography: it constructs impossible kinships. Faces, flowers and textures seem to belong to the same species endowed with memory. The work thus questions what we inherit and what images can invent for us.
Intermundia: from photography to the phygital threshold
Intermundia grows out of the photographic series Artemisia. The model is trained on the original images and grafts the faces into landscapes inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. The historical reference does not function as a decorative backdrop: figure and environment are treated as a single organism.
Through augmented reality, the portrait continues beyond the print. The screen reveals hidden layers and transformations, making the work a passage between a physical object and a digital event. The support is not denied, but made porous.
Lumen et Ombra and Pholisma Sonorae
Lumen et Ombra combines photography, AI and programming. Ascetic and aristocratic figures exist in a double dimension: the physical image and a metamorphosis accessible through technology. Time does not preserve the face; it sets it in motion again.
In Pholisma Sonorae, the video portrait becomes a flow. A personal archive of photographs and texts feeds a fungal and psychedelic imaginary. The machine acts as an interpreter, but the vocabulary remains Basilè’s: contamination, solemnity, metamorphosis and attraction to what is both biological and artificial.
Exhibitions, museums and collecting
His trajectory runs through GNAM, MART, MACRO, Palazzo Collicola, and museums and galleries in Europe and Asia. This continuity distinguishes an occasional experiment from a sustained practice: AI is a chapter within an exhibition career begun in 1994, rather than a promotional identity constructed afterwards.
To collect these works, ask what the artwork includes: print, edition, certificate, file, AR activation, software lifespan and migration options. In phygital works, technical conservation is part of provenance.
Sources & links
Sito ufficiale dell’artista