I call it death-in-life and life-in-death
     W.B.Yeats

Each painter has his own world, that he expresses in his style and according to a certain imagery.

In the case of Matteo Soltanto, this world takes inspiration from human anatomy and above all from the ambiguous context of the human face, which he uses as a material grammar to be developed into different images. 

For this reason, his way of painting is more an analysis of the object represented than an expression of the artist’s self, and it leads to an essential transcription of a living being inside the frame of his portrait. 

But if one thinks, quite appropriately, of Rembrandt - in the portrait of his Mother dressed in the clothes of a prophetess - (the example that Soltanto bears in mind while painting), one recognises the quite absolute absence of any countenance and one witnesses as well the transformation of the face into a painful mask or a stony and cracked landscape.

No natural enphasis or breath, non living clue or trace of humanity crosses the space of Matteo’s canvases, whose solitude and rocky desolation is suspended in the anguished light of a desert which begins just beyond the extrema Thule of animated space and time.

This fact also implies the treatment of the portrait as a metaphor of the Lebenswelt, in this case a negative image, in which everything tends to be concentrated and dried out. “Here is rock and no water”, writes T.S.Eliot in The Waste Land - a title which stands for The Modern Age - but Soltanto is not searching for spiritual sources, which aim at a re-birth of a fallen Eden.

He, on the contrary, is content to remain “on the bottom” and to explore it step by step, in Bologna or elsewhere (lately in New York), touching and cutting the “ruin” of the face with the curiosity of a surgeon, thereby giving us the dry surprise of human flesh - inherited from Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro and Francis Bacon’s tragic cry - decaying and resisting time without a single drop of blood.