Painting began as an encounter between man and animal. In the first examples at Lascaux, Chauvet and Cosquer, there is no trace of the human face. No landscapes are painted, nor the stars or the representations of the gods, nor flowers or trees, not even the first artefacts, but only animals. There is the negative mark of the artist’s hand on the wall, some geometric shapes and a few graphical signs, but above all, the three-dimensionality of the wall is covered by animals: horses, bears and lions, rhinoceroses, buffalos, mammoths, penguins and ibexes. The site-specific cave wall is believed to be a kind of sail, separating but also connecting the world with the spirits. By the light of a flickering torch in their hands, early men, animists, shamans, hunters and artists in one person, animated and traced the faces and bodies of animals on a wall with charred wood and a few colors, with quick, ingenious, confident strokes.

36,000 years later one morning, Jacques Derrida, having finished his shower, found himself naked in front of his pet, his cat, who was watching him motionless. And there, Derrida, face to face with his feline, felt a sense of modesty. Not in front of a person, but in front of his cat; an animal. This encounter gave rise to a seminar that the philosopher held towards the end of his life, of which his last book is the transcript: The Animal That Therefore I Am — a title that inspired Mattia Sinigaglia’s solo exhibition in A plus A. The painting Ti vede (He sees you) is the most representative in this exhibition. A bright green nature, with a desert on the horizon, welcomes a motionless fox in the center. The animal looks the observer straight in the eye; the only interference between them is an apparition: an enormous, yet transparent, Greek woman’s face that invades the scene. Sinigaglia’s painting was born from a real and unexpected encounter with a fox in the woods near his studio in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, an hour from Bologna.

Sinigaglia’s work is more aware of the history of forms and symbolisms than are the animals of Lascaux, Chauvet and Cosquer. The position of the artist today is necessarily more saturated with artistic traditions and their contradictions. The Greek and Roman worlds, the first great civilizations and their theologies, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, capitalism and technology have placed the human body and face at the center, marginalizing the animal. Modernism and conceptual art have moved away from the model of nature. The distance between man and animal is now infinitely greater. The intimate, naturalistic and at the same time spiritual look that we can observe in the animals of Lascaux, Chauvet and Cosquer is now lost. But it is still the same encounter and the same gaze in painting today. Because in truth, art knows not only an evolutionary history, otherwise, painting could not have been so perfect since its beginnings. And from its origins, the encounter with the animal is crucial to art.

Mattia Sinigaglia currently lives and works between Venice and the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. Sinigaglia draws inspiration from symbolic elements found in art history, alchemical figures and scientific notions. In this new cycle of small sculptural paintings and large canvases, the fil rouge is the encounter between animality and humanity, a relationship that oscillates between union and detachment. His practice is characterized by alternating subjects between figurative and aniconic geometric forms, exploring the dual nature of the human being and the theme of magic. In Sinigaglia’s works, the figure of man and animal often appears within a mysterious space portrayed in vibrant colors, stimulating the deepest imagination in viewers. His visual narratives built on pictorial language open up a dimension in which viewers connect with their inner selves through unexpected revelations that go beyond the predictable. Symbolism is at the core of Sinigaglia’s expression, and this connects his work deeply with the practices of Symbolist art from the Renaissance as well as the 19th century. This symbolism is now enriched and interrogated by one of the most fundamental pictorial and philosophical questions: the encounter with The Animal That Therefore I Am.