Mattia Noal originally comes from Italy and has been living in Frankfurt since 2013. His passion is painting. After graduating from the Institute for Advertising Design in Vicenza, Mattia studied art, music, theatre and film at the University of Padua. This study finally led him to the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona, where he studied painting with Daniele Nalin.
In the exhibition “Cityscapes/Land(E)scapes”, which is part of the 01 season, various of his works are currently on view from January to April 2017 in the context of momentary urbanity. The exhibition places further emphasis on selected positions from the field of urban “social media photography”. The exhibition focuses on the city as a visually experienceable space. Urban architecture and aesthetics are staged and placed in a dialogue between painting and photography. In this way, the city as a virtual world of abstraction can be experienced in a new way. #frankfurttogotostay
For me Frankfurt is …
… first and foremost a place of gathering, because I followed my girlfriend, who lived here before me because of her studies. Besides, the city has also become a place of personal growth for me. A new reality, a new home, a new culture, a new language that I had to learn (there is still a lot to do :)), new contacts … and much more.
What do you love most about your job?
What inspires me most about my job is discovery; discovery in the sense of continuous study, theoretical and practical, testing my technical limits and whether it is possible to raise the “bar” from time to time. Painting requires one to deal intensively with oneself.
Where do you get your ideas from?
Hard to say… I can’t explain it exactly. I think that my training, which all took place in the artistic field, plays an important role. But I can say that I have a great affinity for video games. Videogame as art and art in videogame, with the dynamics of interaction, immersion in a virtual world and the “videogame as storyteller”. Yes that is very present. I think I tell stories on my canvases, or rather I procure the elements and thereby give a story the possibility to be told and take shape.
My lunch break …
… next question, please! :-) It’s really hard to answer this question; I work very flexible and so does my lunch break. I can say that I would like to spend this time more often with my girlfriend and our son.
What trends do you think we will see this year?
Perhaps this has already been mentioned here; I see and live an ever increasing virtualization of reality (both on a personal and interpersonal level), a layering of the concept of reality, so to speak. So we are experiencing a “potentiality” of reality, which seems very interesting to me. However, I find it difficult to judge this phenomenon. There are certainly positive and negative sides to it.
What else can we still learn?
It would be nice if we could learn to observe and get to know what is “foreign” to us with more patience. I think this is the only way to get a constructive and form a meaningful judgment about things.
You should definitely do that in Frankfurt …
I think there are great museums here. I can only recommend everyone to go to the Städel and look at the paintings.
