Based in New York City, Matteo Giuseppe Pani is a graphic designer. Passionate about art since his early age, he found, in his work, the way to live thanks to his creativity. His series “Aishti by the Sea” is a campaign on which he worked in collaboration with Sagmeister & Walsh for the Aishti Foundation. The latter is an exhibition space located just minutes from downtown Beirut, on the Mediterranean side. To celebrate the opening, its founder and owner of Aishti department stores, Tony Salamé, has asked for the design of a campaign around fashion, art, without forgetting the sea, because of its geographical place.

« We got inspired by surrealism to recreate a set design that could combine these three points […] I spend a lot of time trying to look at Dali and mostly Magritte trying to catch some secrets to make our images as dreamy as the ones those incredible artists did. We also got inspired by contemporary surrealism and personally, I also looked at the metaphysic of De Chirico, which was a very good reference of how to represent space and objects in the space », Matteo explains. 

The campaign aimed to be high fashion and luxury oriented. To do this, sketches were first made and were then recreated as more defined photoshop layouts trying to be as accurate as possible in terms of outfits, colors, type of model in the scene and elements inside the compositions. « Everything was carefully thought during this process. Once the client approved the concepts and the layout we eventually shot the models I a studio. The incredible Alexandra Kingo was the photographer we used », he says.