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.