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"Equilibrium Study" belongs to a series of photographs in which Matteo Conti steps outside his primary practice of painting and drawing to create carefully constructed still-life arrangements that he then documents in single large-format photographs of extraordinary compositional precision. The image depicts a green painted wooden cube on a reflective surface, supporting an enormous slab of rough orange-red volcanic rock — its surface wildly irregular, its color saturated to an almost surreal intensity — from which emerges a single anthurium flower, its waxy red spathe tilted at a provocative angle, its black spadix pointing skyward with almost aggressive insistence. Resting against the base of the rock, at the point where its rough volcanic surface meets the smooth green of the cube below, sits a single segment of mandarin orange — small, vulnerable, tender, and absurdly out of place.
The arrangement is both visually stunning and conceptually rich in the ways Matteo's work always is. The juxtaposition of materials is deliberate and loaded: the raw geological violence of the volcanic rock against the manufactured smoothness of the painted wood cube; the waxy, almost artificial perfection of the anthurium against the modest, perishable ordinariness of the fruit segment; the solidity of stone and wood against the fragility of the flower and the mandarin. Matteo has described the "Equilibrium Studies" as his attempt to find the exact point of balance between stability and precariousness, between the permanent and the ephemeral, between the natural world's indifference to human order and the human instinct to arrange, categorize, and find meaning. The reflective surface on which the arrangement rests doubles the composition in a ghostly mirror image that makes the whole structure seem even more suspended, more provisional, more beautiful in its temporary coherence. The series was shown at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2020 to considerable critical attention.
"Equilibrium Study" belongs to a series of photographs in which Matteo Conti steps outside his primary practice of painting and drawing to create carefully constructed still-life arrangements that he then documents in single large-format photographs of extraordinary compositional precision. The image depicts a green painted wooden cube on a reflective surface, supporting an enormous slab of rough orange-red volcanic rock — its surface wildly irregular, its color saturated to an almost surreal intensity — from which emerges a single anthurium flower, its waxy red spathe tilted at a provocative angle, its black spadix pointing skyward with almost aggressive insistence. Resting against the base of the rock, at the point where its rough volcanic surface meets the smooth green of the cube below, sits a single segment of mandarin orange — small, vulnerable, tender, and absurdly out of place.
The arrangement is both visually stunning and conceptually rich in the ways Matteo's work always is. The juxtaposition of materials is deliberate and loaded: the raw geological violence of the volcanic rock against the manufactured smoothness of the painted wood cube; the waxy, almost artificial perfection of the anthurium against the modest, perishable ordinariness of the fruit segment; the solidity of stone and wood against the fragility of the flower and the mandarin. Matteo has described the "Equilibrium Studies" as his attempt to find the exact point of balance between stability and precariousness, between the permanent and the ephemeral, between the natural world's indifference to human order and the human instinct to arrange, categorize, and find meaning. The reflective surface on which the arrangement rests doubles the composition in a ghostly mirror image that makes the whole structure seem even more suspended, more provisional, more beautiful in its temporary coherence. The series was shown at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2020 to considerable critical attention.
