Matteo Trentin (b. 1996, Italy) is a visual and multimedia artist who lives and works between Schio and Padua. Rooted in painting, his practice investigates archives of memory through a layered approach spanning different media. After completing a First-Level Academic Diploma in Painting at the G. B. Cignaroli Academy of Fine Arts in Verona in 2019, he obtained a Second-Level Academic Diploma in Visual Arts – Painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in 2023. That same year, he was an artist-in-residence at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. Since 2020, he has participated in group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, co-founded the artistic collective Proiezioni Sonore with Marzio Savio and Andrea Marini and, between 2024 and 2025, worked as an external tutor for the Painting courses led by Nemanja Cvijanović at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He is currently a member of Unobis, an independent space and collective artists’ studio based in Padua, where he continues to develop his artistic research.
Neither a static repository of past eras nor an investigation of distant memories or historical documents understood as immutable testimonies: in Matteo Trentin’s research, the archive assumes an active function. It is a living organism, an open structure continually traversed by acts of rewriting, omission and new possibilities of meaning. His work begins with autobiographical materials – photographs, memories and events from his family history – and moves beyond the private sphere to examine shared experiences.
Beginning with a painterly foundation, Trentin develops a language spanning installation, photography and material intervention, conceiving the image as a site of transformation rather than preservation. The archive thus becomes a relational space in which the past continues to act upon the present and memory emerges as a dynamic, fragile and continually negotiated process. In C’era, resto, the installation presented as part of the sixth edition of ReA, this research takes shape through a photograph from the artist’s family archive. The image recounts the story of his great-grandfather, who emigrated to Argentina in search of work and never returned. This intimate episode forms part of the broader history of twentieth-century Italian migration, transforming a personal memory into a universal reflection on absence, waiting and the emotional legacy left behind by those who depart.
The intervention does not simply preserve the document but subjects it to a process of transformation: combustion, deposits of wax and the layering of the surface progressively alter the image, making visible the incomplete nature of every archive. The photograph becomes a site in which presence and absence coexist, where what is no longer visible continues to manifest itself as a trace.
Trentin’s research is founded on an act of care that does not seek to reconstruct the past but to preserve its potential for continual reactivation, allowing the layers of time and the narratives held within each image to emerge. Through the viewer’s involvement, individual memory opens onto a collective dimension: the void left by a family history becomes a space of shared recognition in which different experiences can meet.
The archive therefore ceases to be a place of preservation and becomes a generative space capable of producing new relationships between images, people and different temporalities. Trentin’s practice finds its poetic strength in this tension between loss and permanence, erasure and re-emergence, restoring to the act of remembering its living, unstable and profoundly human character.
Text by Erica Massaccesi
