The painter Matteo Masiello titled “Tribute to Michael Champion” the retrospective exhibition organized by the Municipality of Molfetta – Hospital of the Crusaders - from 18 October to 18 November 2003.

On the invitation has published an open letter written by Michele Champion Matteo Masiello
Open letter to Matteo Masiello

Matthew Dear,
the lure of your painting have ancient spells that not enough time to exorcise. They reproduce echoes and suggestions, fantasies and illusions, dreams and acceptances, hovered fantastic flights and ecstatic moments of reflection, in a mixture of global new sensations.
Perhaps before you talk about your painting should talk about you, Your face leader of fortune, lanzichenecco the Borgognone, does not matter, come between us so long ago that no one you remember.
And from your homelands made of mountains and valleys, mists and fiery rain showers, you ritrovasti between the scorching heat of the warm foehn games Mysterious Controra, the olive groves of your Bitonto, miracles from imposing Romanesque and mystical. And you rooted among us without forgetting your origins peregrine, bringing you inside the stigmata of a provenance never betrayed.
The air of imposing lansquenet or Burgundian you remained together with the slow pace, solemn, with few words and with major projects. And among these projects, pledge undying payable to a search never exhausted (the Grail of Imagination and Painting) your way of being Artist. A monacale modesty, a patient tenacity cobbler, the reluctance of those who believe in a fatal destiny, precisely the Painting, make you stranger to cliques, all fashion, the stresses of gallery, the pitfalls of the market.
The friends you seek and you answer with the quiet confidence of someone who has already traveled a long way to not be scared for what still awaits him. And mature, in this waiting, your research. Follow Your Dreams. Discuss with the characters and figures of your Painting. You weave dialogues impossible in the real thing.
Accept the challenge with Life and Eternity.
Do you measure yourself the time that overwhelms everything and everyone and change but you feel stronger than the ability to stop time for a moment of becoming.
So your painting becomes a sign of History.
Fragment of individual history, your and our, but also of the Great Each Other segment for us all.
It has recently done a lot of talk about you and your painting, New way. Found themselves ancestries and legitimacy seventeenth. There has been redone to rebellions and attempted rebellions.
Have created new day aesthetic reasons and even ethics.
All true, yet all is not true.
Certainly the wide-ranging, classic cut, Your way of painting, to measure up to the white of the canvas and the kaleidoscope palette, is not new.
Has, inside, assonance ancient, the classic taste of pagination, the pride of the strong solid craft and imagination descriptive.
The color ranges together with the dynamism of the ontological painted in a scenario only apparently unmoved.
It's a metaphor for metaphor, of allegory in allegory, is not at all strange then if the great fresco of "The Life" becomes a didactic table of medieval flavor with figures dancing in sync with the time.
And yet a scroll and a chick who painstakingly prepares to leave his enclosure now useless.
The figures are chasing prospects in geometric because the story can only be lucid and rational precisely as a law of geometry.
There is a monumental objective in your paintings that brings to mind the sense and meaning of the innermost Egyptian statues that must be seen always in front and the absolute size of the Byzantine figures, mosaics and icons.
And 'more important that what is inside and behind the painting, than it is all that appears.
In this sense touches metaphysics and objectivity post mannerist in a perspective of great relevance. The mystery and the sense of mystery. The description and the symbolic gesture hieratic. The representation and the liturgy of the representation. A secular sacredness with peaks of esotericism (the pendulum, the skeleton of the bird from the egg, Balls, turbans and sashes Eastern, the muse disturbing and absurd box floor with the limits of a clearing).
A spell is not rational for raccontar only dreams but to state emphatically stated intentions and.
Matthew Dear, You and I met a long time ago.
You came riding on the forecourt of the temple dedicated to our great San Nicola. Under arm had a large wooden board and didst know the wonders of the Saint of Mira. I talked to you along. You told him among other things of the miracle of the wheat in the town of Mira hungry, "The practice of ships frumetariis».
You liked it, perhaps for the very hungry you suffered in your incessant wanderings. And you began to paint, patient, methodical, and not be tired, regardless of the time.
The painting is now ready. It took nine hundred years. But who cares?
Moreover since then we have never lost sight of the most. You with your painting. Me with my scrolls to fill because the record of the facts became itself the reality. Just as it is called today for television.
As time has gone, Matthew Dear…

Affectionately
Michele SAMPLE
Bari, 20 May 1991