EPIGRAPHIC MUSEUM / TOSITSA 1, Athens 106 82
OPENING: 19/12/2024, 18:30, Duration: 19/12/2024 – 16/04/2025
Curated by Dr. Katerina Koskina
Για ελληνικά 🇬🇷 κάντε κλικ ΕΔΩ
Since 19 December 2024, the artist Italian artist Matteo Fraterno presented 26 works at the Epigraphic Museum in Athens. These pieces result from frottage impressions on paper, capturing the surfaces of ancient Greek inscriptions—most of which are housed in the museum’s courtyard. Fraterno began experimenting with the frottage technique when he received a supply of Fabriano paper, regarded as ideal for this method, from a descendant of the Verzocchi family, his former producers. His initial application of the technique occurred in 2022 on the outer walls of the Carcere Ucciardone, a still-functioning 17th-century prison in Palermo, Sicily. The series continued in 2023 during a creative residency at the Epigraphic Museum.
The museum, which preserves evidence of the conceptual and material origins of an advanced written code of communication—a code that continues to be a foundational element of Western civilisation—offered an ideal context for Fraterno’s research. Having long focused on the dynamics of human relations and materiality, the artist found in this setting an inexhaustible source of inspiration, enabling him to advance this series using new technical and methodological approaches. Employing frottage—a technique reliant on tactile engagement with ancient human-made artefacts elevated to works of art by virtue of their durability, craftsmanship, and significance—Fraterno enters a realm that is at once tangible and timeless: the realm of myth. This physical interaction with the material traces of the past became, for the artist, a means of overcoming the isolation imposed during periods of enforced confinement.
“The repetitive motion of the hand across the stone or marble surface, the measured pressure required to avoid damaging the paper upon which the image gradually emerges, recalls the gentle care of a mother for her child,” notes curator Katerina Koskina. “This caressing encounter with matter provides a tactile experience incomparable to painting, drawing, or photography—perhaps only comparable to classical sculpture, though achieved without the use of tools that wound the material”.
The artist himself confesses: “As I approached the surface, I began to feel a kind of vertigo—an overwhelming synthesis that made me forget the discontinuity between my body and the material.”
The presentation of the exhibition catalogue took place on Thursday, 10 April 2024, at the Epigraphic Museum.
POLITES 