Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio is pleased to present Rerum Novarum, the new solo exhibition by Matteo Basilé, one of the pioneers of digital art in Europe. For over thirty years, Basilé has interwoven photography, artificial intelligence, and ritual memory into a unique and visionary visual language.

Conceived more as a passage than an exhibition, Rerum Novarum invites the public on an immersive journey through light, flesh, and code. Each image appears as a living organism, suspended between matter and dream, between the human and the transcendent. The title evokes an epochal turning point: if the 19th century was the age of the industrial revolution, today it is Artificial Intelligence that is redefining our imagination.

Basilé does not simply photograph reality—he traverses it like a visionary pilgrim. His works, pigment prints on cotton paper engraved by hand, are offered as visual reliquaries, imbued with a silent sacredness. In constant dialogue with an “educated” AI—not merely programmed—the artist generates visions that do not imitate reality but preserve its threshold, its echo, its ghost.

On display: metamorphic portraits, hybrid natures, bodies entwined with a carnivorous, breathing nature, scenic spaces that become skin and breath. The experience is amplified by a multisensory dimension: an olfactory printerreleases scents of burnt wax and ancient stone, evoking liturgical atmospheres and inner memories.

With Rerum Novarum, Basilé expands his exploration of the concept of the phygital as a new contemporary liturgy—a world where pixel and pigment, smoke and light, human and algorithm do not oppose, but merge. The works are not merely to be observed: they ask to be inhabited, remembered, transformed.

In continuity with the Floramagnifica project, this exhibition marks a new evolutionary phase in the artist’s journey. Here, the face becomes a mutating icon, photography becomes a threshold, and artificial intelligence reveals itself as a sensitive archive, a poetic consciousness, a liturgy of deeply human urgency.

Rerum Novarum is a visual, olfactory, and conceptual journey through the time of transformation. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Now.

Matteo Basilé (b. 1974) lives and works in Rome.
One of the most visionary artists of his generation, he was among the first in Europe to merge art and technology, creating a personal language that transcends the boundaries between disciplines, eras, and cultures. Since the mid 1990s, his work has been a continuous investigation into identity and image, the human being and their representation. In his portraits, beauty carries ambiguity, form dissolves into metamorphosis, and the subject becomes a threshold between the visible and the invisible.