Matthias Olmeta graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Santa Monica University in 1992
He has since travelled the world in exploration of the unknown, to learn and understand the world of mysticism and energies. Olmeta works with the ambrotype; A glass plate coated with collodion is immersed in a bath of silver nitrate and exposed to the light, creative a negative. By placing the plate on a black background, a positive image appears. Using this method, Olmeta portrays the mystical energies of the inner soul, creating piercing portraits.
Olmeta has published several artist books and his works are in private collections such as: Collection agnès b, the Wilson Centre for Photography, the Elton John Collection, Collection Freddy Denaes, Collection Gensollen, as well as international public collections.
//Confronted with the disturbing and intrinsic beauty of these images, one can become uncomfortable. Clearly under such circumstances it isn't easy to give an elaborated judgement, to remain impassive and neutral about something that evokes desire and disgust , the hallucinatory and mystical. We are not asked to observe these pictures but to absorb them.
These people and objects frozen in his photography as in ice, impose themselves whilst we try - in vain - to find some structure or order. But what one does recognise is an anarchy, an acknowledged disorder, the experiences of a life, abandoning the world for the self. The only thing that seems to have been forgotten, or put aside, is the heavy burden of preconceived ideas that photography has carried around for the last 40 years.
All that remains is the pride and power of the creation, a customised production that won't be constrained by modernity and its conveniences; as if to say we can still follow in the footsteps of a past which has already been explored. // François Cheval //
Matthias Olmeta
[1968]
