Cattail spike, commonly referred to as a ‘fallo di campo’ (field phallus), against a black iron-plate background. This work was made for ‘Picnic o Il buon soldato’ (inv. 3204), an exhibition- installation on war in which Mauri connects the figure of the soldier with the artist: ‘The soldier embarked on a journey back home. Like the artist, he revisited the various stages, questioning why he had passed through them. He wondered what led him to stay longer in one place than another. He considered why he became one type of painter before evolving into another. Much like the journey of a man, the journey of the artist passes through growth, sensitivity and death, his own and others’; to a great extent, it’s a journey into the answers his hands have formulated: a journey through places he chose and that were given to him, which he understood and accommodated him, imagined meeting or truly inhabited.’ The only purely naturalistic subject on display, the work’s title namechecks artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), who was a young sergeant in the Nazi air force. The trauma of war drove him to embrace diametrically opposed ideals, becoming one of the most emblematic artists of the twentieth century, responsible for introducing the theme of ecology into art.

1. F. Mauri, ‘Il piano superiore è segreto’, 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. 41.