ARMONIA 5.0 e Le forme dell’umanità: al Mattatoio di Roma le mostre che indagano l’essere umano

From 12 November 2025 to 3 January 2026, Pavilions 9a and 9b host a dual exhibition project that reflects on identity, fracture, and the possibility of recomposition: Armonia 5.0. Allorché di due farete Uno by Otello Scatolini, curated by Claudio Strinati, and The Shapes of Humanity by Keisuke Matsuoka, curated by Tomoko Asada.

Otello Scatolini, Androgino, 2015

Two independent paths, yet driven by the same question: how can the human be recomposed in an age of dispersion? Scatolini, born in Rome in 1964, has worked on this challenge for over fifteen years, shaping marble, resin, lead, gold and pigments into an alchemical equilibrium of forces. His sculpture does not occupy space: it breathes it. His monumental forms feel hydraulic, liquid, suspended.

The material is heavy, yet behaves like water. The title Armonia 5.0 suggests an evolutionary software update of humankind: no longer a dichotomy, but a fusion of opposites. The conceptual emblem of the exhibition is Androgino (2015), a hybrid figure inspired by the Vitruvian Man, projected into the 21st century— a body-synthesis that does not divide, choose, or separate, but incorporates. Nearby, Uovo Cosmico (2005) embodies the archetype of origin: art as a generative act, healing, primordial magic.

A powerful section is dedicated to writing: poured in lead, carved in gold, embedded in paintings or absorbed into sculpture, it appears as a secret language, an indecipherable murmur. Titles such as Grida e sussurri (Cries and Whispers) or Mo(a)rmorio overturn the noise of the present into meditation: the word does not communicate, it vibrates. It does not shout, it resonates. For the first time, visitors will be able to enter the artist’s mental studio through 3D viewers—an immersive experience in the act of creation, guided by Scatolini himself through special performative tours.

 Keisuke Matsuoka, dettaglio Rifugiato cielo, 2022

In Pavilion 9a, Keisuke Matsuoka, born in Miyagi in 1980, reverses the perspective. If Scatolini seeks unity, Matsuoka begins with explosion. His sculptures burst, fragment, and reassemble into forms that do not deny the wound, but transform it into structure. In Refugee Gravity, an ebony face dismantles into shards mapped across the wall: an exploded identity that becomes landscape.

In A tree man, a magnetic body made of wood, iron and titanium gathers metallic dust like a living organism, demonstrating that identity is a field of forces, attraction and loss. The Refugees cycle—developed during his residency in Italy—does not address geographical borders, but inner ones: being a refugee not as a geopolitical condition, but as the universal, potential destiny of any individual.

Matsuoka works with glass, wax, titanium, iron, wood and magnets—materials that dissolve, attract, migrate, reconfigure. His creative process, both material and conceptual, mirrors nature’s own rhythm: to create, destroy, and remake. In the final room, sketches, diaries, molds and test prints allow the audience to inhabit the artist’s studio, to perceive the friction of making, the error as form, and metamorphosis as method.

 Keisuke Matsuoka, A tree man, 2018

The overall exhibition thus becomes a diptych of the contemporary condition: on one side, the tension toward unity; on the other, awareness of fracture. I

Mattatoio di Roma

Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4

Date

11 novembre 2025 - 12 gennaio 2026