Press & Media
Press Kit
Skin and Grace
Book & Documentary – Fall 2026
SKIN and Grace: Igor Mattio’s New Photobook and Documentary on Cuba’s Male Ballet Dancers
A photographic and documentary project by Igor Mattio
New York, NY — September 2026 — Artfineline announces the Fall 2026 release of Skin and Grace, a new photobook and 60-minute documentary film by Italian-born, New York–based artist Igor Mattio.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Skin and Grace is a photographic and documentary project developed over multiple journeys through Cuba with four professional male ballet dancers.
Moving between Havana, ballet schools, domestic interiors, abandoned architecture, and natural landscapes, the project follows the dancers beyond the stage and outside the conventions of performance.
Through photographs, interviews, and film, Mattio examines the relationship between the discipline inscribed in the dancers’ bodies and the individual personalities that emerge when choreography falls away. The project considers masculinity, beauty, desire, identity, and the ways in which social expectations are carried physically.
The dancers’ training is always present: in posture, gesture, balance, and the extraordinary control of their bodies. Yet Skin and Grace is concerned with the moments when that control loosens—during travel, conversation, rest, uncertainty, and encounters with unfamiliar spaces.
The project will be released as both a photobook and a 60-minute documentary film in Fall 2026.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am not interested in photographing dancers as symbols of perfection. I am interested in the moment when perfection dissolves and something honest appears.
In Cuba, I encountered a culture in which expectations of masculinity could be rigid and highly codified. Within that environment, these young men carry a form of grace that seems almost involuntary. Their training shapes how they move, stand, and inhabit space, yet something distinctly individual continually escapes that structure.
Skin and Grace grew from that tension: between discipline and instinct, expectation and personality, control and spontaneity.
I wanted to photograph what happens when the dancers are no longer required to perform—when the body is allowed simply to exist.
The camera is there to witness those moments.
— Igor Mattio
ABOUT THE BOOK
Title: Skin and Grace
Artist: Igor Mattio
Publisher: Artfineline
Format: Hardcover photobook
Release: Fall 2026
Content: Black-and-white and color photographs
Focus: Portraiture, body, masculinity, identity, environment, and gesture
The book unfolds as a visual narrative developed through repeated encounters with the dancers across Cuba.
Photographed in ballet schools, streets, domestic interiors, abandoned architecture, and natural landscapes, the dancers gradually move away from the formal language associated with ballet. Their bodies remain marked by years of training, but the photographs concentrate on quieter gestures and on the personalities behind that discipline.
The sequencing moves between individual portraits, group photographs, movement, stillness, landscape, and fragments of everyday life. Images made during rehearsals and staged sessions appear alongside photographs created while traveling or simply spending time together.
The book does not attempt to document ballet as an institution. It uses the dancers and their particular relationship with their bodies as a point of departure for a broader exploration of masculinity, beauty, identity, and self-presentation.
ABOUT THE FILM
Title: Skin and Grace
Format: 60-minute documentary film
Release: Fall 2026
Produced by: Artfineline
The documentary extends the photographic project into sound, movement, conversation, and time.
At its center are four in-depth interviews with the dancers, accompanied by observational footage, staged visual sequences, travel, rehearsals, and behind-the-scenes moments from the making of the photographs.
The film culminates in a conversation between the four dancers and Mattio. Together they reflect on the experience of being photographed and filmed, their relationship with their bodies, ballet, masculinity, desire, fear, identity, and the boundaries between collaboration and observation.
The film combines:
- Observational footage
- Four individual interviews
- A final collective conversation
- Staged visual sequences
- Rehearsal and performance material
- Travel and environmental footage
- Behind-the-scenes moments from the photographic sessions
The interviews are conversational and reflective. The dancers speak from their own experiences rather than functioning as representatives of ballet or Cuban masculinity as a whole.
Their individual voices gradually complicate the visual impressions created by the photographs. The relationship between artist and subject also becomes visible, revealing the negotiations, trust, uncertainty, and collaboration involved in making the work.
The film is not about ballet.
It is about what remains when performance falls away.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Igor Mattio is an Italian-born visual artist based in New York. His work spans photography, film, artist books, and publishing, with a longstanding focus on the human body and the ways identity is constructed, performed, revealed, and interpreted through it.
Mattio studied at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin and began working with photography in the 1980s, initially incorporating photographs into collage, photocopy, painting, and chemically altered mixed-media works.
Photography later became central to his practice. His recent projects have focused particularly on the male body, masculinity, youth, cultural identity, and the relationship between the photographed subject and the person behind the image.
Mattio works in both digital and traditional photographic processes and continues to produce black-and-white photographs as gelatin silver prints.
He is also the founder of Artfineline, an independent publishing and production platform dedicated to artist-driven photography books, limited editions, and documentary projects.
KEY THEMES
- Masculinity and social expectation
- The body shaped by discipline
- Grace outside performance
- Identity and self-presentation
- Beauty and physical presence
- Youth and transformation
- Desire, restraint, and intimacy
- Collaboration between artist and subject
- The relationship between still photography and film
PRODUCTION
Skin and Grace was developed over multiple journeys through Cuba and created in close collaboration with the four participating dancers.
Photobook + Documentary Film
Produced and published by Artfineline
Release: Fall 2026