Matteo Bonacci: Art Direction, Synaesthesia & the Italian Secret That Starts Every Creative Night |
Matteo Bonacci Starts Every Creative Night the Same Way — and Ends Up Somewhere New
Matteo Bonacci is French by birth, Italian by adoption, and defined by neither. The artistic director and art director — who grew up by the sea in Catanzaro, studied design in Milan, and now works across digital, music, and visual art — has built a practice around a single belief: that feelings perceived through one sense can be translated into something visible through another. He came to this through Olafur Eliasson. He arrives at it every night through coffee. We spoke to him about synaesthesia, solitude, and why the person he most wants in a creative group is someone who will teach him something he doesn't already know.
Interview by Leila Antakly
Before the work, there is the ritual. After dinner: coffee made with a mocha, sugar cream whipped with the first drops — Italian secret, he says, with the satisfaction of someone sharing something real. Then music. The phone goes quiet, the night becomes what he calls a cradle, and from that point on each session goes somewhere different. Sometimes somewhere still unexplored.
It is a small thing, and it is also the whole thing. Matteo Bonacci grew up in Catanzaro, on the coast, with memories built around the sea and open air and street games — a childhood of the senses before it was a childhood of ideas. At eleven, dance arrived and he fell for it immediately, understanding something he has spent the years since trying to articulate: that creation mixed with communication was the symphony his future was going to be written in. Design at NABA in Milan followed, then freelance art direction, work with digital agency Ready2Fly, clients including Polydor and Universal Music. The CV is varied. The instinct underneath it is singular.
The encounter that clarified everything happened at Tate Modern, alone in front of Olafur Eliasson's exhibition. He was a spectator and simultaneously part of what he was watching. He did not feel alone despite being by himself. It is a specific kind of experience — the one that good immersive work produces when it gets everything right — and Bonacci has been trying to recreate that precise feeling for others ever since.
"I believe a lot in the synaesthetic process — perceiving feelings with the other senses and then translating them into something visible."
This is the key. Not illustration, not representation — translation. Taking what arrives through one register and rendering it in another. Sound into image. Feeling into form. The inside into the outside, which is exactly the territory the lockdown commission De Fuera occupied: made in collaboration with 3D artist Marika Monterisi, asked to represent the concept of evasion at the precise moment when evasion was impossible. Before arriving at any element of the piece, he paused on the subtle difference between what is inside and what is outside. The work came from that pause.
The pandemic, for Bonacci, produced a clarification rather than a crisis. The compressed urgency of that period burned away the habit of delay — the instinct to wait until you feel ready, until conditions improve, until the timing is right.
"We don't have time to delay. If you're thinking about doing something, it's because you're already ready to do it."
It is a line that sounds like a motivational poster until you understand the context it comes from: an artist who grew up by the Mediterranean, who learned about creation through the body before he learned it through the mind, who starts every working night by making coffee in a specific way and letting the phone go quiet. The readiness he is describing is not confidence. It is attention. You are already ready because the thinking means the preparation has already happened without you noticing.
The last thing he shares is the one that reveals most. Art direction, he knows, is a profession that carries the image of solitude. The lone creative, the singular vision, the individual sensibility applied to a brief. He does not dispute that solitude is part of the process. But what keeps him alive, he says, is the desire to share what happens to him — and in the future he wants to build a creative group, not to teach them, he is clear about this, but to make sure there are people around him every day who are ready to teach him something.
"I would not consider myself up to teaching them."
The humility in that is not performance. It is the position of someone who genuinely believes that the most interesting creative energy moves toward what it doesn't yet know — who makes coffee the same way every night in order to arrive somewhere different each time.
Matteo Bonacci is a freelance artistic director and art director based in Milan, working across digital, music, and visual art. Discover more artists chosen for how they inspire, not just their visibility, at Antakly Projects.
