The Work

SKIN, and Under. Evolving Young Machos, or Not.
Published by Artfineline, 2025

SKIN, and Under moves through territories — geographic, cultural, bodily — in search of masculinity as it actually lives: unperformed, unannounced, rooted in specific soil and light and habit.

The project photographs men in the places that shaped them. Not against backdrops, not extracted from context, but inside it — in the landscape, the architecture, the climate of their own belonging. The sessions are staged, but what is sought is natural: the posture a man carries without thinking, the ease or tension in his skin, the way he holds space when no performance is required. Mattio creates the conditions; the men bring themselves.

Now released as a 252-page monograph presenting over 191 photographs, the book moves between image and fiction. Five writers were each invited to choose a photograph and write their own story from it — not to illustrate Mattio’s intent, but to generate something independent. The image as prompt, not document.

Nudity here is neither performative nor provocative, but instinctive — a quiet fact of skin. Silver gelatin prints — made by hand in the darkroom — slow the image down, insisting on materiality: the body is not a concept but a physical fact.

What emerges is not a single image of the male body but a map of how men inhabit themselves differently depending on where and how they grew up — and what remains when the inherited codes fall away.