A methacrylate sculpture consisting of a column with a triangular base, at the top of which the apex of an isosceles pyramid has been grafted onto a parallelepiped representing a movie projector, pointing towards a cornice-screen hung on the wall, concealing an electric light that simulates the projection beam. Cinema a luce solida is a series of works varying in size and colour combinations that Fabio Mauri created for the Mana Art Market in Rome,1 displayed in an exhibition of the same name in 1968, along with two prototypes of Pila a luce solida (inv. 3399) and two exemplars of Disco bianco (inv. 1120 and 1129). A 1968 review by Fabrizio Dentice says: ‘Some are in ordinary light, some are in black light, and some fluorescent light, enhanced by the special composition of Perspex that gradually becomes impregnated with it, charging up like a battery.’2 In Mauri’s Cinema pieces, the ray of ‘solid light’, first used a few months earlier in Pila, conquered the space in front of the wall, forming ‘crystallised extroversions of the screen’,3 which as Dentice notes, ‘rather than decoration, add a kind of motionless and perpetual happening to the environment.’3 Presented a few months after his Luna work-environment (inv. 922), Mauri’s Cinema a luce solida took his work in an increasingly performative direction, offering a link between his 1950s screens and his 1970s projections onto bodies and objects, in which the thought/projection combo became laden with an ideological component.

1. See Disco bianco, inv. 1120.
2. F. Dentice in Fabio Mauri 1959–1969, catalogue of the exhibition (Studio d’arte Tonineli, Rome, 1969), edited by C. Vivaldi, Rome, 1969, p. 83.
3. F. Mauri in A. Madesani, Le icone fluttuanti, Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2002, p. 177.