Skygolpe and the Face That Vibrates Between Presence and Absence

The silhouette of a face, built from overlapping fragments, appears like a threshold - one that trembles between presence and dissolution. It is a face that does not seek homogeneity or unity. Instead, it offers itself as a territory of collisions: surfaces that refuse to align, dissonant colors chasing one another, details uprooted from their origin and stitched together into a new imaginary skin.

This is the distinctive signature of Skygolpe, the artistic name of Mattia Sommovigo (La Spezia, 1986), an artist working at the intersection of painting, installation, photography, digital art and NFTs. His visual language emerges from a constant tension between identity and disorientation, between form and void, between the physicality of matter and the immaterial realm of the digital.

The new cover dedicated to the Corriere Art Collection, available from Tuesday 25 November in a special collector’s edition, includes a QR code granting access to a video created specifically for this release.

An artist between philosophy and the digital world

With a background in philosophy and a deep fascination for existentialist thought, Skygolpe is today one of the most significant Italian voices in digital art. His works stand in a continuous dialogue between the physical and virtual worlds, not as opposites, but as extensions of each other, expanding the field of perception and meaning.

For the artist, the silhouette is not a face to define; it is an entry point to the human condition, a way to approach our essence without the pretension of depicting identity. It is an open, universal form - one that speaks the language of the human before that of portraiture.

His faces - empty, mute, yet strikingly powerful - seem to embody the solitude and inwardness at the heart of existentialist reflection. It is no coincidence that Jean-Paul Sartre’s words resonate when standing before them: “God is Silence, God is Absence, God is the Solitude of men.”

“In Skygolpe’s work, the archaic force of the face meets the fragility of contemporary identity,” says Gianluigi Colin, curator of the Corriere Art Collection. “His silhouettes are open doors: they do not portray someone, but speak about all of us. They are a visual meditation on the human condition, on our uncertain presence and our ongoing reconstruction.”

META DATA: Exploring the hybrid territory of human and AI creativity

The work META DATA is part of Skygolpe’s most recent cycle of video installations and represents a crucial step in his investigation into the interaction between human creativity and artificial intelligence. At this stage of his research, the artist approaches AI not as a mere production tool, but as a disruptive agent, an entity capable of redefining the very boundaries of artistic gesture and the image as a form of visual thought.

In META DATA, the artist activates a mechanism of visual entropy: each composition, initially defined, is progressively deconstructed through the intervention of artificial intelligence, reaching a state of perceptual instability. The image thus loses its semantic unity, fragmenting into a constellation of pixels, marks, and residues that evoke a “ruin aesthetic,” where the failure of control becomes a space of poetic revelation.

With META DATA, Skygolpe invites us to reflect on the status of the image in the algorithmic era: a space of tension between the visible and the invisible, where the work does not merely represent, but manifests as a process, an open inquiry into the relationship between perception, memory, and identity in the time of post-humanity.