Today we’d like to introduce you to Marco Matarese.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I was always in love with visual art, I attended art schools since I was a child (high school, academy of fine arts). My dream was to be a painter, to be able to live doing paintings and frescoes. It seemed like the best way to spend my life. For more than 13 years, I have also lived with remarkable results, I had my own firm of decorations with which I had the opportunity to do frescoes for the beautiful halls of castles and churches.
When the crisis in Italy blocked “construction” and therefore the work of my firm, which was my life, I joined to an antique dealer to be able to buy and sell antiques from the world with him. For years I have bought and sold sculptures, paintings, etchings, jewelry and objects that I had the opportunity to love more and understand their true story, made of travels, exchanges and new lives.
I met a person during this period and when she saw the paintings, I did she began to propose to learn to tattoo in order to open a tattoo studio with her. This possibility was never entered in my mind, but I began to consider it after that. I searched through the social media tattoos and tattooers to understand if what I loved was possible to make on skin. I saw the work of an excellent tattooist from San Francisco, called Brucius, and seeing his work I understood that what I wanted to do (etchings on the skin) was possible. I didn’t get to be a tattooist like many other artists, driven by the desire to tattoo and then find the personal style, but contrariwise: I found the style that I wanted to do and this fact convinced me to become a tattoo artist.
Please tell us about your art.
My work seen from an eye without much malice is simply a transposition of etchings drawings turned into etchings on human skin. I strongly believe in a more complex idea: to mix the work of human being like paintings, etchings, objects, sculptures and literature to create designs from a timeless limbo, suspended. My poetics is made not only of graphic virtuosity, but also of feelings and emotions, a simple one broken sculpture speaks of me as of all human beings like “animals with emotions”.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
The impression I had when I began to tattoo, after drawing and painting all my life, was to go back to the starting point again and it was some kind of extreme sport for designers, as if I were trying to draw the things I had always drawn but while doing bungee jumping. All the components that made a “perfect” design almost impossible in my first experiences were the limits that this work still puts me every day. Understanding the fact that the skin is something “living” and “aging” passes through a thousand small skills which are required a lot of experience. My only advice to those who are now approaching this work is this: do not be in a hurry to touch the skin, but to look in all ways to start doing tattoos on people with the best preparation possible.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
In this historical period my work, like the work of most of my colleagues, finds a space accessible to the public on social media, the main is Instagram, as well as my personal site and that of the studio (“PURO”).
Contact Info:
- Address: via Mauro Macchi, 50 – 20124 MILANO (MI) – PURO Tattoo Studio
- Website: https://marcocmatarese.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcocmatarese/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Marco-C-Matarese-1477290219181666/
Image Credit:
Marco Matarese
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