Eliseo Mattiacci

Eliseo Mattiacci (Cagli, 1940 – Fossombrone, 2019) was an italian artist. He moved to Rome in 1964. In 1967 La Tartaruga gallery opened Mattiacci’s first solo exhibition, featuring “Tubo” (Tube), a 150 meters, yellow-coloured, nickel-plated iron tube that “changes the perception of the environment and encourages the public to modify it.” In those years, contemporary artists experienced the limit of conventional institutional spaces together with a strong need of unconventional contexts to express their languages, which drove to a greater freedom in action and forms of expression.  In this scenario, the Roman gallery L’Attico-garage by Fabio Sargentini marked a turning point: Mattiacci in 1969 entered the gallery with a compressor that crushes a path made of pozzolana ash.

Along the years, the research of the artist strengthened around the relation with the specific site, both natural (as a quarry) and human-designed (as an archaeological site) environment; also, his work focused on visible and invisible physical energies – such as gravity force and the attraction generated by large magnets – fueled by a constant, ideal tension to remove weight from the heavy matter. The exhibition held at the archeological site of the Trajan’s Markets in Rome in 2001 has exemplified his established narrative.