Following the "landscapes" whose matter was lacerated in depth, at times with violence, as if to lay bear and reveal an internal crisis, now these presumed landscapes stretch out in order - and even with elegance - to house some significant finds of what they had been. No longer the overwhelmed matter but an empty-full in which what remains is accumulated and disseminated by way of transparencies and by means of sign-word interventions that play on the two-fold mechanism of the recognizable and the incognizable, leggible and not leggible, allowing one to understand that the operation implies a sublimation, that it adds magical-evocative values and that it recalls a generically "sacred" exploration.
It is the word of poetry that comes to light, the word of the holy texts which exhibits itself in its characteristics of ambiguity. I have already written that that organism appeared to me to be a body of memory retrieved and reproposed. Or that the disposition/make-up reveals an energy around which it agitates in a vortex and forces downwards towards a centre, and even if also the opposite force which "supports" towards the surface and beyond those dispersed elements one would reasonably say cohabits: the 'sinking' and emersion coincide. That this contrary movement has suggested the image - that is, the process of the camera obscura - is totally comprehensible: in the sinking, from the coagulation of compact and matteric forms in relief, and in the colour of the darkness, one has the reflection of the presence. Often the result of the method is the constitution of a painted-written-graffito text which within itself includes the variants, fragmentarily exhibiting them, or else a unity achieved by way of dispersion. In Matalon's sculpture more or less the same thing takes place.
Here the force becomes one of verticality and the pyramid, lance and pinnacle take form (the line by Dylan Thomas - "my world is pyramid" - can be found on more than one occasion in the painter's imaginary), and it is possible to disassemble and recompose it, to render it increasingly more subtle/slender, almost as if driving in to itself within emptiness; or else freeing it to the point of showing its fundamental solidity. And it can rotate around itself, showing every side, every extremely dense detail of its weft, its tissue. Once again we have the full and the empty joined within a unitary design of very minute and varied details, almost citations from the most diverse places of aspiration to knowledge. Sculptures with a secure foundation and system, compact, to be read by way of a delicate 'embroidery' of signs, ornaments and only hinted at figures in a series rich in references that are not definable with certainty as regard their origins which could be Oriental, gothic or prehistoric. Although in whatever case, always of forceful suggestiveness. I believe that what I have already noted is still true: in other words, that in the overall work of painting or sculpture - indifferently - an anxiety for the acquisition of a method that tends towards uniting by way of differences still exists.

Roberto Sanesi
Como - November/December 1993

From the presentation of the exhibition at the Galleria Il Salotto in Como