A German military helmet hangs from a sheet of black iron with the title ‘IL BUON SOLDATO’ stamped in white and circled in chalk in the upper left-hand corner: ‘The good soldier is the young man.
Whose innocence and insipience equate. The young person’s body offers more solutions than problems. A boundless reserve of time is felt in his arms, in his temples. Premonitions of life pulsate in his brain, more of a heartbeat than a mental rhythm […] Power makes perpetual use of the young man, esteeming him a true customer and a true commodity. It exhorts him to clean up, to get into order. It must arm him, and once armed he is swept away by something less vulnerable than himself, which is death. The power that dictates this to him is not particularly evil. It is power or the social institution.’1 This work was part of the exhibition-installation of the same name at Castelluccio di Pienza in 1998 (inv. 3204), in which ‘in a lucid sequence of “scenes”, Mauri collects fierce and beautiful objects, objects of military use – helmets, wicker baskets carrying bullets, canteens, bomb-carrying saddlebags – and juxtaposes them with dry, prickly flowers in a series of still lifes elegantly set up on black boards made of iron panels.’2 Mauri wrote: ‘I never loved the soldier. The idea for this exhibition comes from witnessing war as it unfolded, from never having stopped seeing it since the immediate postwar period.’3

1. F. Mauri, ‘Introduzione’, in Fabio Mauri. Picnic o Il buon soldato, catalogue of the exhibition (Galleria La Tartaruga, Castelluccio di Pienza, 1999) edited by Plinio De Martiis, San Quirico d'Orcia, 1999, p. 7.
2. C. Christov-Bakargiev, ‘Pertinenza e memoria’, in ibid., p. 13.
3. F. Mauri, ibid., p. 7.