From the first confrontation with Mattia Novello I understood that the intrinsic need of human nature to know and represent the world, has taken on a completely innovative declination in his personal artistic research. Starting from the search for the representation of the universe, Mattia then began to develop a proportionally inverse study to the original one, focusing instead on the study of the individual, particularly on himself and on the personal representation of reality. As in the case of the works of the Self-portraits Aurei series, canvases in which the artist represents himself not through the faithful reproduction of his somatic or physical features, but by trying to capture his own aura in a snapshot. By definition, the aura from the Greek - breath - is a luminous radiation capable of reflecting the soul of the individual, therefore something that cannot be represented because it is immaterial. Mattia has found a way to immortalize this luminous flux on the canvas and if at first glance the works are striking for the particular application of color, their creation process is even more important. The works are born from the liquefaction of ice sculptures suspended on the canvases, colored sculptures of parts of the artist’s body, feet, hands, head, which melting make up the golden portrait, whose colors are different depending on the moment in which the composition is created. The choice of using ice is a synecdoche for the human body, composed mainly of water, which, like ice, deteriorates and disappears. Of our human existence only the acts we perform and the marks we leave remain, such as the color on the canvas, an indelible trace of the individual presence. The entire performative act that leads to the composition of the Golden Self-portraits is a true representation of individuality, given by the different colors of the aura and a metaphor for the precarious and transient human condition. After the investigation through the canvas, I chose to change media. I sought an alternative to the sedimentation of colors on the medium through the outflow of water created by the melting of casts. I thus landed on glass, experimenting with another intrinsic property of water: evaporation. This technique makes the pigments broken down by the freezing of color adhere to the glass. In this case, the water, which is from the beginning the vehicle for the laying down of the colors, takes a similar but opposite path to what happens on the canvases. It does not leave its trace by disappearing downward, passing through but by rising and dissolving into the environment. Mattia Novello was born in Vicenza, Italy in 1985. He graduated in visual communication at the European Design Institute in Milan, then in fashion photography at the School of Visual Art in New York and in Mixed Media Art at the Parsons School in New York. After spending part of his first career in New York, he now lives and works in Italy. The artist starts from the observation that nothing really has a beginning or an end. Small, large, matter, non-matter are not absolute dimensions. Every form and attempt to classify our surroundings demonstrates the human impossibility of grasping the complexity of the surrounding universe, of the Whole. The same progress and idea of time-present, past and future are fundamental for man and are not innate in the objects and phenomena investigated. The artist’s task is to recognize the inherent limit in man and his gnoseological process, trying to grasp and represent the essence of reality, beyond what is known or supposed to be known. In all of his works, Mattia Novello tries to grasp the essence of reality reaching the conclusion that time is circular, that the present, the past and the future coexist in a single eternal present, that the infinitely small is also infinitely great. From the fascination of the eternal Nietzschean return there is no loss or nihilism, but rather a vision of secular pantheism. Mattia therefore suggests a possible path to search for meaning, because in the end what man sees as a contradiction is actually part of a whole. If the meaning of the Whole is not humanly reachable, for the artist the answer is the search itself, the tension to always go further, to communicate the intuition of the Whole, which resides, as mentioned, in the connection between human opposites and contradictions. In the circularity Mattia finds the tool to represent reality, a synthesis of “opposites”: life-death large-small, yesterday-today. Thanks to the work, the final message is that we are part of the Whole, it reaches the viewer immediately, before the words and rational thought that prove it. A powerful lever of this empathy is the ambiguity (between reality and symbol, between saying and unspoken) present in all the artist’s works.