Galleria d'Arte
Raffaella De Chirico

via Monte di Pietà 1A
20121 Milano

Ph +39 392 89 72 581





Matteo Procaccioli Della Valle | Oriental Digression

From 31/01/2025 To 08/03/2025

"A lover in the garden, the still and roaring water, love in the afternoon,
the imitation of history, love before and love after,
the flesh and writing, writing about love and finding it."


Nagiko mentions the seven things worth living for
in the finale of Peter Greenway's Pillow Tales,
taken from Sei Shonagon's medley


The Raffaella De Chirico Arte Contemporanea Gallery opens the 2025 exhibition season with a solo-show by Matteo Procaccioli Della Valle (Jesi, 1983), entitled Oriental Digression. It is the artist's second solo exhibition curated by the gallery, but the first to be exhibited in the gallery in Milan.

The unpublished photographic project presents itself as a tribute to imperfection and heterodoxy, exploring the figure of tattooed and overweight Japanese women, who subvert through their aesthetics millenarian traditions and established stereotypes.
Now very widespread on Western skin, Japanese tattoos called irezumi enjoy a very bad reputation in their native land having for a long time been compared to affiliates of the Yakuza mafia. Even today, in fact, entry to many Onsen (thermal baths) is prohibited for those with tattoos. And if the number of geishas has significantly decreased over time, certainly the figure of the Japanese woman (but we could broaden the concept to women in general) is still linked to an extremely slender physicality and refined skills in the feminine fields of arts, singing and dance.

Procaccioli's Japanese ladies seem more like characters originating from Tarantino's cinema (remember the young and crazy bodyguard Gogo Yubari from Kill Bill: Volume 1) or from a certain contemporary Japanese literature such as Matsuda Aoko's Country of Wild Women which from geiko stories; they are imperfect in a striking way, with large behinds, rolls of fat and very florid breasts. Explosives.
In a world that constantly seeks aesthetic perfection, these figures embody the explosive freedom of being able to tear apart any aesthetic and customary scheme.
The girls of Procaccioli won't necessarily swing an iron ball like Gogo to defend her (woman) boss but they are probably tired of serving tea.

The effect of some details due to the use of AI is imperfect, deliberately in contrast with the excellent potential of this medium; Procaccioli chooses, through artificial intelligence as well as the subject, the freedom of a consciously imprecise result. He prefers to develop his transgression against twenty years of work with "traditional" photography through a medium whose defects are clear, thus exalting the error through a potentially perfect instrument, making it imperfect. It is therefore a successful project due to the coherence of subject, poetics and medium, in which the imaginative will starts from thought, and through words and writing emerges in wonderfully defective figures.

Art Exhibitions Milan



Contemporary Art Exhibitions Milan
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