Introduction

Il catalogo è questo – This is the list!
The work of art as an experiment in the verification of evil in the world as a screen

by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

This essay introduces a multi-year endeavour of cataloguing the works and strands of research of Fabio Mauri (Rome, 1926–2009), an artist and intellectual whom I had the privilege of knowing since the early 1980s. It has been realised with the help, knowledge, dedication and love of many people, starting with Sara Codutti, who assisted me in the enormous archival and editorial effort, up to the people who work today at the Fabio Mauri Studio – Associazione per l'Esperimento del Mondo and who for many years (some more, some less) worked in the artist's Roman studio, assisting him and helping him to create his works: Ivan Barlafante, now director of the Studio, Marcella Campitelli, Dora Aceto, Claudio Cantelmi, Sandro Mele and Serena Basso. Guardian angels of his legacy, they provided indispensable assistance. Valuable and collegial, the other members of our Scientific Committee – Laura Cherubini, Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Andrea Viliani and recently joined Caroline Bourgeois – are fine connoisseurs of Mauri's work and have collaborated in discerning the categories necessary for the ordering of an artistic project that shuns categories: what a profound aporia.

Thus, we have come not to the simple subdivision of his works into Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Performance and Installation, but to a more complex classification that includes:

1. Works on wall:

(1a) non-protruding wall works

(1a.i) on canvas or on wooden panel

(1a.ii) on paper

(1a.iii) photographs

(1b) protruding wall works

(1c) early works.

2. Works in space:

(2a) installations

(2a.i) installations with performance

(2a.ii) installations with projection

(2b) objects

(2c) performances

(2c.i) performances with installation

(2c.ii) performances without installation

(2c.iii) performances with projection

(2c.iv) lecture-performances.

3. Multiples:

(3a) object multiples

(3b) books

(3c) prints.

4. Other:

(4a) 3d models ¹

(4b) design drawings for projects

(4c) literary works

(4d) theatre plays

(4e) songs

(4f) diaries

(4g) video works.

Enriching this Catalogue Raisonné are writings by relatives (the forewords by Santiago Mauri and Achille and Sebastiano Mauri), in addition to essays by the aforementioned members of the Scientific Committee. The volume also contains writings by Giacomo Marramao, a philosopher and friend of the artist, and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who interviewed him.

I met Fabio’s brother Achille Mauri (Rimini, 1939 – Rosario, 2023) only after the artist's passing in 2009, and by slip of the tongue, by mistake, or by luck, I often called him Fabio. He would smile, proud to impersonate him. This publication was strongly desired by Achille himself so that his older brother's work could be handed down to History in a scholarly manner, and thus in a supremely mysterious way, since partial points of view benefit the uncertainty of knowledge – even the most seemingly objective knowledge of science.

Achille's sons, nephews therefore of the artist, Santiago and Sebastiano Mauri (President and Vice President respectively of the Studio that preserves the artist's archives, works and library), kept their compass straight after their beloved father's passing and brought this work to fruition, supporting it in many ways, as they write in their prefaces.

Fabio Mauri was for me a teacher and a friend, an already mature man whom I approached at the suggestion of Giancarlo Politi, asking him to discuss with me the relationship between art and the world, when I was drafting a commissioned essay on the correspondence of art and politics. ² We became allies in research and never ended our dialogue until his passing, a few months after he was the first artist I invited in March 2009 to participate in the thirteenth edition of documenta in Kassel, which had recently been entrusted to me. He was happy to take part in dOCUMENTA(13). He confided in me that he wished he had studied German while, sitting in an armchair in the living room of his home above Piazza Navona in Rome, he looked at portions of the doormat that the assistants had lovingly placed on the floor at his feet. He was thinking and projecting mental writings on the doormat: thoughts that sometimes manifested themselves as words literally cut out in the material of the Zerbini, his latest horizontal, walkable works. Nessun segno particolare di cultura è fuori da un testo generale storico e nessun testo generale storico o interpretazione di mondo è fuori dall’enigma più generale dell’universo (No Particular Sign of Culture is Outside a General Historical Text and No General Historical Text or World Interpretation is Outside the More General Enigma of the Universe) (2009) was exhibited at dOCUMENTA(13) in the Museum Fridericianum in the summer of 2012, along with the presentation of the performance Che cosa è la filosofia. Heidegger e la questione tedesca. Concerto da tavolo (What Philosophy Is. Heidegger and the German Question. Table Concert) (1989), as well as other works.

References to physics, diagrams, formulas and theories about the universe often surface in the work of Mauri, who loved reading physics books. Always poised between theology and astrophysics, his studies on the infinitely small and the infinitely large led him to reflect in his works on the concepts of matter, energy, time and the mystery of the universe.

‘Universe’ is a word that recurs often in Mauri's writings and works, such as in Insonnia per due forme contrarie di universo (Insomnia for Two Opposite Forms of Universe), a billboard set up in Rome's Via Portuense in 1978. The work alludes to a world that is perhaps not knowable, or would be if only we could find its formula. The work cites Willem de Sitter's diagram, derived from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes the primordial universe from a cosmological constant that accounts for dark energy in the field of an expanding universe. Mauri and I talked for years about this universe, so present and yet elusive, but we never talked about God; yet there are few things as deeply religious as Mauri's quest to understand a universe without a centre, where mysteriously Good and Evil are present, knowledge and its abuse, leading to the myriad forms of suffering, from human to cosmic. A universe that screams, or perhaps, a universe that weeps. The word ‘universe’ derives from Unus vertere: something whole that turns and turns in a unified way, a fourteenth-century idea, similar to the Cosmos, but more specific because it is composed of forces in relative attraction.

For me, and for the art world, Mauri was an artist who made works in black and white, unexpressive and very precise in method and form, placing reality as it is before the viewer and revealing its absurd cruelty, as if the works were an experiment conducted inside a physics laboratory. His universe was sparsely inhabited by colour – a few flecks of red here and there and nothing more – and by the displays of virtuoso graphic skill. In recent years, however, after his passing, numerous expressionist and colourful works on paper have surfaced with religious subjects done in the early post-World War II years and especially in later works from the 1980s onward. These are fiery, passionate and even childish works, expressing a part of the character that Mauri always kept on probation: a mad self under observation, deeply longing for a simpler, more direct form of art, not granted to him because of his deeply critical, Adornian thinking, which saw no possibility of lyrical poetry in the contemporary world, yet stumbled upon it at every turn. These first and last drawings burst into this Catalogue Raisonné, and he will forgive us for collecting them and showing them to the world. They complicate the understanding of his art, making it impossible or, rather, endless.

During the 1980s I had an insight that surprised Mauri, but with which he ended up agreeing: that all the apparent heterogeneity of his work could be gathered under one big theme, one big form, namely the ‘screen’ in that everything was determined by the theoretical question of projection – onto the screen and from the screen. The screen was thus not only a chapter in his work, which lasted some years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but underlay everything. This hypothesis thus appeared in some of his own writings in the late 1980s, and in the first monograph ³ on his work, which I published in 1994 on the occasion of the retrospective at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.

Indeed, until 1994, it was easy to think of his oeuvre unfolding over time through several distinct phases, each of which shared little with its predecessors or successors: painterly expressionism to New Dada collage; essential zeroing down monochrome and minimalist work; conceptual politically engaged painting, sculptures and installations in the 1970s and 1980s; the muted but object-filled installations of the early 1990s and early twenty-first century. Similarly, it was easy to think of Mauri as having ventured simultaneously into different, distinct genres of expression such as painting, theatre, sculpture, installation, performance art and theoretical reflection. One might, again, have thought that the early religious paintings and drawings of the late 1940s, or the expressionist ones of the years 1954–56, such as Balcone, folla (Balcony, Crowd) or Gli amori difficili (Difficult Love Affairs), shared nothing with the New-Dada collages of comics and painting of the late 1950s, such as Cartooning; and that these, in turn, had little to do with the cold, monochromatic white screens of paper or canvas on a protruding frame, also made in the late 1950s and 1960s. What, then, is the relationship between the later Schermi-targa (Licence-plate Screens) of the early 1960s – in which the work semiologically reflects on urban street signs and incorporates their elements – exhibited at La Salita Gallery in Rome in 1963, and the 1968 environment Luna (Moon), made for the exhibition Il Teatro delle mostre (Theatre of Exhibitions) at Galleria La Tartaruga, also in Rome? Similarly, what could ever have been the connection between this environment, which introduces the viewer into a ‘virtual’ world of polystyrene, and the searing experiences of ‘real’ historical memory of the ideological works and actions made from 1971 onwards, the year Mauri first presented in Rome the complex action Che cosa è il fascismo (What Fascism Is), followed the same year by Ebrea (Jewess) and later by Vomitare sulla Grecia (Vomiting on Greece, 1972), Manipolazione di cultura (Manipulation of Culture, 1973–76), Linguaggio è guerra (Language is War, 1975) and Oscuramento (Obscuring, 1975)? Still following this reasoning, one could ask what was the relationship between these deconstructive works of European political and ideological history and, on the other hand, the series of Proiezioni (Projections) that the artist had been making since the mid-1970s, literally projecting films onto bodies, objects, buildings and even woods, as in the work Intellettuale (Intellectual, 1975), in which the film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) was projected onto the chest of its author Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 1922 – Rome, 1975), wearing a white shirt and sitting on a chair. And what did the lectures on aesthetics punctuated by performances that the artist began to present in 1987, such as Dio e la scena (God and the Scene)or Ricostruzione della memoria a percezione spenta (Reconstruction of Memory when Perception is Off, 1988), mean in relation to this all-physical encumbrance, as if to erase the boundary between aesthetic theory and artistic practice, illustrating theory with art and vice versa, to the point of refuting the distinction?

To sum up, the themes that Mauri tackled, and the diverse modes of expression he employed on different occasions seem to be numerous and heterogeneous. And yet a fundamental thread, almost an obsession, ran through the artist's every move, and determined the multiformity of his actions. Underlying it all is a reflection on the screen – the cinematic screen and the television screen – and the implications of projection ⁴ in contemporary society and on subjectivity and subject-formation – leading to the homo cellularis of our current world. ⁵

Today I would like to add that the other, even more obvious question that accompanies his life and work is about the causes and modes of existence of Evil, in the ecology of a universe that does not necessarily have to provide for it, Darwin notwithstanding. Mauri explores the theme of Evil, which seems to contradict any logic of an ordered cosmos of the universe, as a theological, artistic, moral, biological and physical question. In 1974 he had occasion to say:

‘It seems to me that I have identified some alternative points: one, in order to make an ideological judgment on contemporary society and therefore on ourselves, it is necessary to have a notion of good and evil. The avant-garde seems exempt from this. Think of abstract art, these secular, untouched zones outside of ethical and political debate. I consider art, by whomever, to be a particularly real phenomenon that has the same physicality as, say, a pair of horses, or an individual.’ ⁶

In 2022, he added: ‘I still don't quite know if God cares about art; I have never understood it, much less my own, which emphasizes evil, for which I have a certain eye.’ ⁷ With these few lapidary and enigmatic words, Mauri makes of the artist an intellectual and of the intellectual an artist. And he draws a precise self-portrait, that of an artist-intellectual who places questioning and uncertainty, religion and ethics, the relationship between the individual subject and the world, at the core of his activity. Both from the aesthetic point of view (in the sense of the rejection of formalism and the concept of the autonomy of the work) and from the structural and methodological point of view (in the sense of embracing complex systems of presentation and generation of the work), an explicit critique of modernism is discernible in almost all of his work, not least because it separates art from its ethical and moral task. Modern art is secular, but art for Mauri is traversed by all that secular cannot be.

But back to his artworks.

Among the leading figures of the Italian post-World War II avant-garde, Mauri was a multifaceted figure – a visual artist, writer, playwright, a founder of journals, a publisher, a teacher. Artistic practice, which Mauri considered to be the main activity of his life, was from the very beginning a field of experimentation within which to test different thoughts and theories: in his comic strip collages, Schermi (Screens), Proiezioni and performances, using graphite, pigments, papers, objects, films, bodies and sounds, he constantly sought to ‘understand the coded nature of the world by returning it in precipitates of meaning in the form of works of art’. ⁸

His story is also intimately connected to that of twentieth-century Italian publishing. Closely linked to the Bompiani family, his father Umberto Mauri (Rome, 1898 – Milan, 1963) founded in 1932, together with Arnoldo Mondadori (Poggio Rusco, 1889 – Milan, 1971) and Valentino Bompiani (Ascoli Piceno, 1898 – Milan, 1992), the company Helicon, ⁹ which in the 1930s imported Mickey Mouse to Italy and from 1937 took over the distribution company Messaggerie Italiane. In 1942 Mauri founded with his childhood friend Pasolini the journal Il Setaccio (The Sieve), which published his first drawings. ¹⁰ Then, the Second World War infected his life. After the war, at the age of nineteen, Mauri – deeply religious and scarred by the discovery in 1945–46 of concentration camps and Holocaust-related atrocities – began to suffer from psychic and mystical crises that led to his internment in a psychiatric hospital, where he underwent thirty-three electroshock sessions. He was in and out of the asylum and in and out of religious centres. In an obsessive search for atonement, as if belonging to a bourgeois family was both a privilege but also a source of guilt, Mauri found refuge in religious texts. For this he aroused concern within his family, which was of secular tradition. He spent long periods in complete silence and abstinence, transcribed passages from the Holy Scriptures, studied manuals of dogmatic theology, and was particularly attracted to great mystics such as St Ignatius of Loyola and St Teresa of Avila, and heretics like Cornelius Jansenius. He also read the philosophical writings of St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, Aristotle, Blaise Pascal, etc. The subjects of the drawings of this period are almost exclusively religious: saints, biblical scenes, close-up faces of Christ rendered through a dogmatic, Byzantine, or hallucinatory and mystical iconography, in any case a far cry from the Italian Novecento style of the drawings he had published only a few years earlier in Il Setaccio. An encounter with Father David Maria Turoldo (Coderno, 1916 – Milan, 1992), an intellectual and poet, led Mauri to illustrate, in 1948, the collection of his poems Io non ho mani (I Have No Hands) published by Bompiani. The following year, the publishing house Sansoni used one of his drawings for the cover of the book Gesù e il suo tempo (Jesus and His Time) by Daniel-Rops (pseudonym of Jean-Charles-Henri Petiot, Épinal, 1901 – Tresserve, 1965).

In 1952, Mauri was officially and permanently discharged from the Ville Turro psychiatric hospital in Milan, and it was only then, in 1953, that he matured the decision to be an artist. Many drawings of this period are influenced by Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1881 – Mougins, 1973) and in particular by Guernica (1937), which had just been exhibited in the Sala delle Cariatidi of the Palazzo Reale in Milan, still damaged by the bombings of 1943. The religious theme mingled with more secular subjects, though never abandoning spiritual motifs. ‘When I returned to middle-class life in Milan in 1954, I started drawing and painting again. My artistic references were Kokoschka, Nolde. Carlo Cardazzo, owner with his brother Renato of the gallery Il Cavallino in Venice, liked what I was doing very much, so he immediately organised my first solo exhibition.’ ¹¹ In this first exhibition in 1954, as well as in subsequent shows in Milan the same year at Galleria Apollinaire and Libreria San Babila and then at Aureliana gallery in Rome in 1955, Mauri presented oil paintings and drawings on paper strongly influenced by the historical avant-gardes, particularly Expressionism and the Fauves, as well as Italian painting of the 1930s. The subjects oscillated between religion and worldliness, with some political references. Along with the paintings, Mauri also exhibited a collection of drawings in which the trauma of war emerged through a gallery of bodies reminiscent of concentration-camp images published at the end of the war: prostrate, obliterated, mutilated, skeletal, deformed women and men inhabited by deadly demons. I disordini del dopoguerra (The Postwar Turmoil), as the title of one of the 1954 drawings reflects, is rendered through physical deformations often reminiscent of Munch; Un uomo qualunque nel sacco (An Everyman in the Sack) and Donna nel sacco (Woman in the Sack), both 1954, show figures with hooded heads, literally ‘put in the sack’, deceived, blinded and unable to see the truth because they are manipulated. This is a representation of an unfree, blind and consequently visionless humanity.

Thus Mauri lived his childhood during fascism, went through the war and matured his thought and work in the 1950s, when cinema and television were creeping into daily life with the first RAI broadcasts in 1954. The beginning of his research should be placed in this context, as an equal and often anticipatory contribution to the artistic, sociological and philosophical debate that was taking place around the theory of communication; a debate that would develop especially after these early and precocious reflections, during the 1960s.

Mauri's initial production of paintings and drawings evidenced a first turning point when, in 1956, the artist moved from Milan to Rome, where he came into contact with the art of Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 1915 – Nice, 1995): ‘a decisive encounter, overloaded with consequences’, ¹² he would later recall. After some experiments close to Informel and Abstract Expressionistart, Mauri's pictorial research changed pace again: inserts of collage cartoons began to appear in the drawings, quick brushstrokes in the style of Franz Kline (Wilkes-Barre, 1910 – New York, 1962) (who exhibited in Rome at Galleria La Tartaruga in 1958) and drips reminiscent of Jackson Pollock (Cody, 1912 – Long Island, 1956). He drew cartoons, comic strips, stylised, often erased figures, sketches of almost illegible dialogues on which he began from 1957–58 to repeat like a mantra the English words ‘THE END’ alluding to a post-apocalyptic world, to a ‘time after time’, an infinite time, as if after Auschwitz and the atomic bomb there could be nothing but an astonished anticipation of an apocalypse that had already partly happened. Hovering between an anticipation of American Pop Art and autobiographical references, ¹³ Mauri deconstructed the language of comics, taking its verbo-visual elements and recombining them into poetic and pictorial compositions that investigated the new subjectivity that was emerging with the mass media. It is no coincidence that in those years Mauri befriended and collaborated with the founder of semiology Umberto Eco (Alessandria, 1932 – Milan, 2016) and with the experimental group of Italian intellectuals, Gruppo 63. Unlike Pop artists, some of whom in the 1960s had turned to increasingly mechanical techniques of image production, as if to simulate the seriality and dehumanisation of the contemporary media culture, Mauri showed no interest in a direct re-proposition of the iconic and simulacra images of contemporaneity. Instead, he was interested in the status of narrative, the ‘making’ of history, the making sense of related signs in sentences. The quick, black stroke that often appears in his collages/drawings is reminiscent of Kline's gestural stroke, but it is emptied of the existentialist and heroic afflatus of the American Action painter. Fast and loose, it is used as language, as a system of already codified signs. It is the outline of the comic book bubble that encloses the words of the characters, ‘spoken’ by the language; it is the rectangular box that punctuates the narrative sequence, or again it is the same figure as the stylised comic book character.

These are paratactic structures, ¹⁴ quickly juxtaposed figures, variations on ‘montages’ of stylised and highly coded figures and emblems. The use of fundamentally allegorical procedures and paratactic montage found in these early works exhibited by Mauri recurs throughout his later work, in the juxtaposition of objects/sculptures that are an integral part of the performance Ebrea (Jewess) (1971), as well as in the complex installations of objects and works that mark the activity of the 1990s in exhibitions such as Interno (Indoor) (1990) and Studenti (Students) (1992).

During this period, Mauri began to make his first Schermi, starting with the Schermo-Disegno. Verticale / Orizzontale (Screen-Drawing. Vertical/Horizontal, 1957), consisting of a sheet of white cardboard on which a black band is painted along the edges, reminiscent of the cinema screen, in an almost 16/9 ratio. At first glance in line with the trends of the period aimed at zeroing down to the monochrome, Mauri's Schermo-Disegnoactually differs from them in that it does not limit itself to a formalist reduction of the pictorial work but aims to transcend the level of mere representation: by tracing a black band or frame on a white sheet of paper, the artist ultimately creates a ‘screen’, a potential field of projection in which all future images are possible or have perhaps already been projected.

From 1958, Schermi of paper and later canvas stretched over protruding frames were added, which echoed the shape of a television set that protruded forwards towards the viewer. Emblematic of an emerging ‘media’ society, Mauri's Schermo became a ‘second-degree’ work, not a literal screen for projection but a sign and signifier in itself.

Mauri was thus investigating the world ‘semiologically’even before the term had been coined. In his works, starting with the first Schermi, every element of reality is a linguistic sign and every linguistic sign is reality. It is these experiences, which would last until the early 1960s, that led Mauri to develop by the end of the decade an art based on the investigation of the relationship between beauty, evil, ideology and power. His work, coeval with American and British Pop Art, sees Europe not as primarily a society of consumption and spectacle, but as one that produces, for better or worse, ideologies.

Cinema and television are a ‘double’ world, in which to project oneself live, and be projected onto. Since the late 1950s, the Schermo implicitly or explicitly present in all the works, has been understood by Mauri as the fundamental emblem of our image-based civilisation, a ‘mediated’ society in which communication rises to the status of knowledge (of the real) as well as to that of praxis itself (every concrete and practical element of life). Therefore, for Mauri, art is no longer pre-modern traditional figuration, nor the formalist and autonomous abstract work of ‘modernism’ (which made research on perception one of its main objectives).

From the outset, the work is a ‘second degree’ for Mauri, a meta-work that speaks of the experience of reality in a meta-real way; it is meant to be a critical deconstruction of the mechanisms of manipulation of thought, as well as an exploration of the identity of the subject in a complex age of experiences that are pre-determined by narrative, filmic and comic-book representations and all other contemporary ideological and media apparatuses.

Art for Mauri consists precisely in creating situations in which one has to come to terms critically, ‘experientially’ and also psychoanalytically with this condition of predetermination, and thus performs a function of cognitive catharsis and ethical empowerment of individual acts.

The white Schermo (1957–60), taken up in later years, is only seemingly far from the accumulation of juxtaposed elements of the collages. It is the other side of the flow of signs; it is the place of every possible projection, every possible narrative. It is the language, it is the medium and it is the message. It is a screen where every projection, every film, every comic strip has already been, where we perceive, in its fundamental emptiness and semiological openness to the signs/symbols of the world, also the risk that media society runs: a world without free will. ¹⁵

In the very same years in which Mauri was reflecting on the predetermination of every experience, to which he alludes through the words ‘THE END’ repeated in the collages and on some screens, as well as through the constant references to the locations of occult messages, the American journalist and sociologist Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, published in 1957 and translated into Italian, for Einaudi, in 1958 under the title I persuasori occulti. Packard, too, denounced the possibility of a loss of freedom of choice due to the manipulation of thought operated by advertisers, unbeknownst to consumers, with the tools of motivational research and psychoanalysis applied to marketing. In the field of communication theory, however, rather than Packard, Mauri's Schermi bring to mind the medium-as-message theses of Marshall McLuhan, whose two main texts, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (1964) were published in Italian in 1976 and 1967, respectively.

Ideology is a thing, a concrete and tangible thing, Mauri always thought; it has nothing abstract or purely immaterial, and there is no Platonic world of ideas. Ideology lives in concrete things and actions and has potentially devastating effects on the historical level. In line with all sociological and semiological research – including precisely that of McLuhan on the relationship between technology and knowledge – Mauri exposes the medium, indicated by the Schermo; and the medium is his message, without the need to affix anything else to it. The screen is an object, it is a household appliance, a monitor, or even an ‘icebox’, as the artist liked to joke. Thus it does not belong to that vein of modernist art that leads to the empty and blank monochrome as the outcome of a process of formalist reduction and essentialisation.

The inclusion of Abstract Expressionist gestures occurs, in this case, as an opening to the semiological appropriation of context. If the advertising image is also a ‘thing’, it follows that things are signs; and here is why a work such as Cassetto (Drawer, 1960) appears in Mauri's work, exhibited in 1962 in the Nouveau Réalisme exhibition curated by Pierre Restany at the Galleria La Salita in Rome. A wooden box is hung on the wall and contains in three-dimensional space a collage of different elements, of bought objects, including boxes of Buitoni pasta, with clear reference to the Duchampian concept of the ready-made as a modified objet trouvé (found object).

Semiologist Umberto Eco, who had collaborated with Bompiani publishers just as Mauri was heading its Roman editorial staff and ordering the materials for the first two volumes of the new journal Almanacco Bompiani (1959 and 1960), was studying the world as a semiological universe in which all communicative phenomena, at different levels of organisation and complexity, are systems of signs with their own codes at the theoretical level. Eco was doing this in a manner parallel to Mauri's visual research, and they were friends. ¹⁶ One of the characteristics of post-industrial society, as opposed to industrial society, is the production and exchange of signs instead of the production and exchange of goods. Mauri reasoned critically against this situation: he did not simulate or re-present the experience of ‘sign-images’ in a Pop key, with the exception of a few works such as Sinatra and Marilyn, both from 1964. Instead, by showing the blank screen, he operated a process contrary to that conducted by the culture industry of the time: if things are signs, then signs function as things, and their three-dimensional and object-like rendering in the works follows.

It is no coincidence, then, that Mauri was among the first artists after Burri to ‘provoke’ the flat surface of painting by creating, beginning in 1958, protruding canvases, the Schermi, which constitute his first profound artistic awareness of the relationship between mass communication technologies and ideological manipulation. Mauri was convinced that Europe had created ideology and that ideology had a physical weight, capable of producing Evil.

And so, in 1958, Mauri created a monochrome made of shaped canvas jutting out towards the viewer, pushed by a screen-like frame, its edges rounded just like a television set. From that beginning in 1958, all subsequent families of Schermi flourished. ¹⁷

After the projecting, objectified, white form of the first paper or canvas Schermi in 1958–60, until 1963, the artist uses a fine gauze in the upper part of the frame, capable of filtering signs-objects from view. In the lower, unvarnished part of the Schermi-targa, such as Drive-in (1962) object-signs appear in the shape of licence plates, rectangular and with curved edges like those of a screen, protruding towards the viewer. In the Schermi-targa, in fact, the viewer is not only projected into the picture-screen, but is also represented at the bottom in the form of a small jutting black rectangle. As in a large drive-in movie theatre of the 1960s, where spectators watch a film while remaining in their cars neatly parked under a giant outdoor screen, viewers of Mauri's work find themselves projected inside a mega-screen in which they are both screen and projection. The audience is part of the communication structure, and is therefore also part of the message itself. The object has entered the sphere of the subject, outside the surface of the painting; but at the same time it is also the subject that is introjected into the semiological space, which has already become a sign. ¹⁸

Under the gauze of the ‘screen’ portion of the painting, strips of street signs also shine through, as if they were subliminal messages from some occult persuader. ¹⁹ In these Schermi-targa of the early 1960s one sometimes glimpses, behind a gauze-veil, a forty-five rpm record that also alludes to contemporary experience as a series of already engraved, predetermined events. In Schermo casa (Screen-Home, 1962) the entire space of the canvas is now dominated by the black ‘plates’ (the viewers), as if there is no longer even a need for the screen, since the subject of the gaze has become a screen and an ‘etched’ identity. ²⁰

The Pile (Torches) and the Cinema a luce solida (Solid-light Cinema) works, developed in 1967–68 and exhibited in Rome and Milan in 1968, constitute a further chapter in the process of objectification and reification of messages, and consequently of media. Just as the Schermi place the viewer in front of the projection site, and the Schermi-targa emphasise the receiver's co-participation in the message, the Pile and Cinema a luce solida present, as if it were a three-dimensional solid, the beam of light that serves to create each projected image, also removed from any supposed neutrality of communication. Light, like signage, like thought, like the ideology on which the artist will dwell directly in the works of the 1970s, is a thing, heavy and cumbersome, far removed from the utopian vision of technological and kinetic art of the period that made it a playful and liberating element. To that vision, to that utopia, Mauri's reflection contrasts radically, like a boulder.

More than a year before the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, experienced televised live by much of the Western world, Mauri presented the Luna environment in May 1968 during the exhibition / festival Teatro delle Mostre, the series of artist interventions at Galleria La Tartaruga. This is a decisive step toward the direct and literal involvement of the viewer within the ‘screen’. The artist constructs an enclosed, dark, spaceship-like space and fills it with balls of expanded white polystyrene, a new artificial material. The viewer, who is now an actor, enters it, as if he or she were penetrating the artificial world of the screen, as if it were possible to have a real experience of the media world: physically and literally entering a monitor, and not just projecting one's inner contents onto it. Luna thus completes the operation of breaking the subject/object, real/virtual boundaries: the viewer enters the environment and experiences its reality in the flesh, in the screen.

And so it is no coincidence that now, freed of the spectator/projection boundary, Mauri devotes himself to making works in which, just as signs are things (the objects in Ebrea), figures are also people (the boys who play the roles in Che cosa è il fascismo the young woman who undresses and dresses in Ideologia e natura (1973), the naked woman who slowly cuts her hair and pastes it, just as slowly, on the mirror until she has made the shape of a Star of David in Ebrea. The historical audience of the original performance, organised in honour of a Nazi leader's visit to Italy during Fascism, is now an embodied, and not abstract image. The spectators are us, called to witness the same spectacle as the original audience. Everything is a sign, but signs are things, and therefore everything is true: the ‘Jewish’ skin and therefore our skin, the victim and the executioner, the manipulator and the manipulated.

All Mauri's subsequent works would take into account the need to physically involve the viewer, from installation performances such as Ebrea and Che cosa è il fascismo to actions such as Oscuramento (Darkening), which even included the consumption of a caffè di guerra (‘war coffee’) made from chicory when real coffee was not available due to the war, or such as Via Tasso: un appartamento (Via Tasso: an Apartment, 1993), where viewers find themselves involved, willingly or unwillingly, in a real religious ritual, celebrated inside the premises that were used by the German SS as a prison during the occupation of Rome in 1943–44. In the case of this latest performance, the Duchampian concept of the ready-made is again taken beyond its intended limits. It is not an ‘object’, in the sense in which Duchamp understood it, that is chosen and modified, but it is an actual ‘experience’ (the religious ritual) that becomes an artwork, while retaining its status of truth and authenticity. The boundary between the subject who observes and the object to be observed, as well as between the personal sphere and public and political life, constantly slips: even without being aware of it, one becomes a co-participant in others' stories. One is experienced by – or becomes complicit in – narratives and projections.

What implications, what consequences does being ‘in the screen’ cause? The identification between subject and event prevents understanding until the subject itself is awakened from its slumber through a critical deconstruction of the phenomenon. Inside the screen, the self loses its freedom, and even itself. It is the supreme violence of the ontological nakedness of the self, a total and tragic dehumanisation, that is presented in the performance Ebrea, perhaps the best known of Mauri's works. The Schermo, in Ebrea, is replaced by a mirror, and the hair that the girl cuts off and pastes on the mirror is the ‘thing’ of the body, literally ‘giving body’, in a rite of absolute sacrifice of the subject, to the symbol – the Star of David.

Beginning in 1971, Mauri's works no longer refer directly to the virtual world of the screen, but rather to the narrative that is told there. By now within the ‘projection’, the viewer is a co-participant, through the actions of real people and through the objects that populate this space of manipulation, manifestation and embodiment of ideology.

The small white Schermo returns in the 1970s as a ‘second-degree’ Schermo that refers as a meta-linguistic object to the earlier Schermi, but now it is repeated almost obsessively and accompanied, as in Warum ein Gedanke einen Raum verpestet? (Why Does a Thought Poison a Room?, 1972), by German phrases that alter its meaning: each phrase and each Schermo becomes the physical condensate of a fragment of ideology.

If the ‘anxious object’ of American culture was consumerism, the moment here and now, Coca-Cola, the Campbell’s soup immortalised by Andy Warhol, this is not the case for European culture, the artist often repeated in our conversations. The European ‘object’ is precisely ideology, just as projection was the ‘object’ of his first Schermo.

‘The anxious object in America coincided with the object of consumption [...] The theme in Europe was matched somewhere. But nested elsewhere. The implying presence of the commodity did not assume, in these parts, equal symbolic force. ‘Chianti’ was not, nor had it ever been, ‘Coca-Cola.’ It remained dialectal. Reticent. The object was configured in at least a different order of signification. Anxiety operated in itself before and outside ‘things,’ stripping them of all reliability as signs of history. An ideology presided over the very idea of consumption. It was itself the object. The ‘anxious object,’ I say. Not concealed in things, negatively suspended over them.’ ²¹

Works such as the aforementioned Che cosa è il fascismo, Ebrea, Oscuramento, Linguaggio è guerra, Manipolazione di cultura, as well as I numeri malefici (The Evil Numbers, 1978), Europa bombardata (Bombed Europe, 1978) and Umanesimo/Disumanesimo (Humanism/Dehumanism, 1980) function, as the artist has repeatedly indicated, as ancient ‘spiritual exercises’, immersions in evil, homeopathic cures or prescriptions of the symptom, as we would say today. One is attracted and seduced by the harmony of the gymnastic display, the cleanliness of the debate of ‘fascist mysticism’, the intimate appearance of family memories that many of the object-sculptures in Ebrea express. Mauri in fact did not recognise Platonic aesthetics, which places beauty primarily on the transcendent plane, as a value. He saw Pythagorean harmonies as traps and deception. He did not recognise beauty as good. Rather, his is a development of Stoic aesthetics, because over the concept of the Beautiful he makes that of the Good prevail. The ‘spiritual exercise is observing and experiencing the repeated gesture of the naked woman cutting her hair in front of the mirror, subtly sensing the horror conferred on the object-sculptures around her by the titles that give them names (Finimenti in pelle ebrea. Alta scuola militare Oberklandertan-Wien [Harness in Jewish Skin. Oberklandertan Military Academy – Vienna], Carrozzina ebrea [Jewish Baby Carriage], etc.). Mauri proposed to the viewer a journey to the height of evil, in which the apparent objectivity with which things are proposed, presented almost as ‘normal’ potential relics of a world in which Nazism had won, provokes deep revulsion, unspeakable emotion. The artist's personal recollection of historical Fascism, with its cult of harmony and symmetry, of beauty and youth, of simplicity and order, assumed, in his mature work, the character of the ultimate lie, of the highest degree of evil presenting itself as good, of the pinnacle reached in Western Europe by the manipulation of thought.

Fascism, with its scenic and stagecraft apparatus of propaganda, was for Mauri the epitome of the possible perfection of politics in the age of the screen. The book Manipolazione di cultura consists of a sequence ofcollagesof fascist-era photographs (the parade, the party, the regatta, the official speech etc.) and concludes with an image of a period cameraman whose caption reads: ‘They film everything’, as if to emphasise in an Orwellian way the close link between new media (film), new communication technologies and the consolidation of the totalitarian state in the twentieth century.

The performance Che cosa è il fascismo directly addresses the collective psychic removal of contemporary history through the re-enactment of a period ludi juveniles ceremony. Again, Mauri carried his reflection on the predetermination of experience in the media age to the question of ideological plagiarism as an extreme example of covert persuasion – plagiarism also operated thanks to the projective modes and the status of knowledge determined by the media, significantly exploited also by the regime through the development of the film and radio industries. Thus, the screen and projection no longer refer only to the post-industrial and simulation world of cinema and television, but are the sites of the manipulation of political consensus, the tools of the most refined and pervasive ideological seduction: the ‘doctrine’, the ‘fascist mystique’. It is no accident, then, that the spectators (seated in the stands where they are sorted and divided according to categories, next to a rank-and-file German ‘guest’ represented by a wax mannequin) and the actors (the young people performing the play) move and act against the background of a large white screen (this time it is a real screen) that bears only the words ‘THE END’, but on which a series of vintage Istituto Luce Films are projected in the final action-performance.

Even before the beautiful giovani italiane acting in Che cosa è il fascismo, Mauri had already used in the Schermo Marilyn, the seductive symbol of femininity provided by the movie star. The female image is as ambivalent for the male artist Mauri as language is; she is the object of desire, she is the image projected onto the screen, she is the prototype of a beauty that can distract critical faculties and leave the ground open for covert persuasions. But hers is also the body on which evil is engraved, it is the different that is removed, it is the girl who undresses and dresses in the same garments in Ideologia e natura until their ideological value is completely distorted. Hers is the body of ‘Young Germany’ in bombed-out Europe, at the end of Nazism. Hers is, finally, the very body of the screen, the bare back on which the film Joan of Arc in Senza ideologia (Without Ideology, 1975) was projected. Once the performance part of Che cos’è il fascismo is over, once the Film Luce is over, when the patriarchal viewer almost savours (with some shame) the successful persuasion, the images disappear and only the sounds of bombs are heard.

Mauri's focus on the ideological function of the media is not far removed from what philosopher Louis Althusser (Birmendreïs, 1918 – La Verrière, 1990) was writing in the early 1970s about the function of the multiple ‘ideological state apparatuses’, including the media (radio, press, publishing, television, etc). ²² Like Mauri, Althusser held the thesis of the material existence of ideology, of its ‘thingness’, which can only exist in the practices of ‘ideological apparatuses’ (family, religion, school, media, etc.). The symbol of identity constituted by the Star of David slowly composed by the girl with her hair is not an abstract linguistic sign: it is physical and material as much as hair, teeth or skin are. It is the ‘thingness’ of intolerance and suppression of individual identity. Not far from Mauri's reflections in these early 1970s are also the theories of Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Kaufbeuren, 1929 – Munich, 2022), whom the artist had met during a trip to Germany, on the repressive and ideological use of the media, expressed in books such as The Consciousness Industry. ²³

The first experimental television broadcasts were in 1939 and were interrupted by the war. They resumed in 1954 in a forward-looking Italy that wanted to forget its traumas. Hardly anyone at home had a television set; people went to watch it at the bar after dinner. The programmes broadcast live represented modernity, the emerging consumer society, but also the utopia of democratic mass communication that was capable of educating, conveying information and news, and also uniting the country from North to South around the Italian language and a new national civilisation just sketched out by the new cinema. Unlike cinema, however, television was supposed to be closer to the people, more joyful, and also ‘live’ – a mirror of a present, instantaneous time that flows and changes relentlessly.

In 1972 – at a time when intellectuals, semiologists and educated people were still programming state television – Enrico Rossetti and Paquito del Bosco produced a programme titled ‘Happening’ that illustrated this new living form of art that transforms everyday, customary gestures into symbols of the identification between lived life and artistic work. One evening, after a historical introduction to early American happenings by Allan Kaprow and others, an incongruous presence arrives on the Italians' television set that lasts two minutes and forty seconds: Il televisore che piange (The Weeping Television Set). It is a happening commissioned by RAI State Television from Mauri, an artist capable of considering the space of the screen, of the monitor itself, as a place to create a work specifically related to its context. Il televisore che piange is the only work Mauri made for television and, with News from Europe / Vegetables (1978), it is his only experiment in video art. The work is fundamental to understanding the profound relationship between the semiological works of the 1950s and 1960s and the ideological works of later years.

On the TV screen we see the countdown 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 followed by a framewith the name FABIO MAURI that precedes a freeze frame on the title of the work; in a pressing manner only twelve seconds of white screen follows accompanied by the sound of a deep lament, repeated like a piece of music as many as two times: ‘Wee, weee, weeee + wee, weeee, weeee.’ The lament closes with a short final sob, a final little ‘wee’: an excess, a surplus, an extra moment of pain. It is a human voice crying, a voice that only for a moment might sound like that of an infant; after a very short while, in fact, one realises that it is instead an adult wailing. It is an adult television set then, a personified, animated object speaking to us, lamenting the world of the humans who created it, an empty world made of now-empty humans. It speaks of suffering in the media age, when the emotion of suffering is not generally associated with televisual virtuality. It is not necessary to project a sad movie: the screen itself is a source of suffering, alienation, discomfort. Or perhaps the screen itself suffers.

‘This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends’, wrote T.S. Eliot in his 1925 poem The Hollow Men: ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ After the brief sob, a coda image appears: ‘THE END’, as if the end came as soon as the communication began. In twelve and a half seconds, the author's pessimism is transformed into tragic farce, absolute Adornian negativity. And soon after, the tie-less, handsome young artist appears. Mauri explains his work in one minute and fifty-one seconds, as a professor would. ‘The happening breaks a habitual, customary action, that of transmitting images, transmitting nothing but the television itself’, he states in the closing words. Even our gestures are part of the happening in the moment when we turn on a television set that fails to produce images, and where the artist is between two screens, the paper one that hid him when he was filmed crying and the one of the television set. ‘I was always here, behind the white screen, it's my lament’, he states. It is a statement of poetics, an assumption of ethical responsibility; only a brief allusion to the reasons why a television set might weep, years before the ‘alternative facts’ and ‘post-truth’ of today's world – our digital civilisation of information on the ropes amidst rivers of images and tweets: potential truths in which social media are intertwined with populism. But in 1972, a long, syncopated lament suddenly emerges from the television set, enters homes and bars. Unexpectedly, the object-machine anthropomorphises and weeps, mourns a catastrophe that has already occurred, with a profound expression of grief.

Il televisore che piange concerns a type of screen, the television screen, to which all the protruding Schermi paintings Mauri made alluded until his death in 2009. Uninterested in experimenting with new video languages, the artist wanted to reveal the very identity of the media subject. An important chapter in his oeuvre is in this sense the series of ‘projections’ made three years after Il televisore che piange, beginning in 1975. Literally projections of film on animated objects and bodies, they began with the screening of the film Red Psalm (1972) on the chest of director Miklós Jancsó during the action Oscuramento. These are not projections on large cinema screens (where the viewer becomes detached from lived life, exits from the surrounding reality to sink into the fiction of cinema), but on objects and furniture chosen for their symbolic value in relation to the film, and for their ability to give physical body to the ideology, to the drama that is gathered within the image, within the fiction. In Intellettuale, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo is projected onto Pier Paolo Pasolini, sitting in the foyer of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna. The experience is that of a projection of thoughts onto the world, and the world is a screen where projections flow. To embody projections is also to return the projection to its author: his body is the screen. The object is the subject, as the small black plates were as many ‘screens’ within the Schermi of the 1960s. The projection is material and physical, it is object and subject. This is also the case in the conceptual play Lezione d’inglese (English Lesson, 1977), in which the actors perform in front of a projected film, and in L’Isola (The Island), written in 1958–60 and performed in 1964 and 1966, sign language, in the form of comics, had been enlarged and used as a set design.

Variously titled Senza, Senza ideologia and Senza titolo (Without, Without Ideology and Without Title), the Proiezioni transform film and the projector-machine into sculptural material and matter through an extreme development of the modern, Brechtian principle of revealing artifice in order to bring into the play its profound reality. In 1975 in Bologna, Pasolini was wearing a white shirt on which the black-and-white images of his film flickered. Over his body, almost foreshadowing his imminent death, the story of Jesus is told in the very words of the Gospel. The scenes set in the southern Italian countryside and the figures of real peasants transform the story into a secular, human affair, where the final crucifixion is accompanied by the tragic drama of pain, in fully neorealist style, reflected on the face of Mary, wrapped in a black cloth and supported by women also dressed in black, their faces markedly hollowed by wrinkles and sorrow. ‘You will hear with your ears, but you will not understand, and you will see with your eyes but you will not comprehend, for the heart of these people has grown insensitive and they have hardened their ears and closed their eyes so that they do not see with their eyes and so that they do not hear with their ears’, says the narrator. ‘My Father, why have you forsaken me?’, asks Jesus on the cross. ‘He calls Elijah, he calls’, says a soldier. ‘Let us see if Elijah comes to save him’, replies another Roman soldier, who urges his colleagues not to wet Jesus’ mouth. Jesus lets out a cry, buildings collapse as in an earthquake, dust envelops the already stony Sassi of Matera, and dramatic music by Luis Enríquez Bacalov (San Martín, 1933 – Rome, 2017), an Argentine-born Italian soundtrack composer, accompanies the tragic scene.

Mary's lament cannot be heard in Pasolini's 1964 film because it is covered by Bacalov's soundtrack, but it can be sensed. Perhaps it is precisely this lament that appears glaringly in the face of the world and History in Il televisore che piange seven years later, in 1972. It is perhaps also this weeping screen that, three years later, on 31 May 1975, becomes Pasolini's chest in the performance work in Bologna, which Mauri decided to call Intellettuale. The author of the film, Pasolini, becomes his own character, simultaneously astonished agent and receiver of culture. He is Christ, assuming all the ethical responsibility and weight of his own artistic act; he cannot hide behind the screen, or behind a camera, or behind a cathartic story of others' sacrifice. Only a month had passed since the last act of the Vietnam War, with the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, and we find ourselves in Bologna, five months before Pasolini's murder, on 2 November 1975, on the beach at Ostia. Life and narrative weave, inextricably, around the drama. The artist is a witness, and therefore condemned to not yet be dead, to be always only a survivor whose fate is to narrate the catastrophe that has already happened, a THE END that returns eternally and without escape.

So here is the deep lament of a TV screen ‘without’, telling us its view of the world, because it is the machine-slave of dehumanised humans, tired of showing us images of bombings and Napalm; it is a machine more tender than we are, animated by feelings we no longer feel, between one screen and another, one click and another (one post andanother, one fake newsor post-truth and another, we would say today).

In contrast to most ‘modern’ avant-garde works, Mauri undertakes with his ideological actions and artworks a retrospective analysis of the past in which the historical method, the making sense of events, constitutes – with respect to the problem of ideology – an analogue of the semiological method with respect to the problem of signs in mass-media civilisation. The theme of historical interpretation as a necessity of freedom, as a method of not being passively experienced by language, is central to the action of Dramophone, presented at Studio Cannaviello in Rome in 1976. The work is structured in three parts. In the first ‘station’, a dog stands in front of an old gramophone (an allusion to the record label ‘His Master’s Voice’) and the image of the record is again a metaphor for contemporary experience as a predetermined experience, already etched in the grooves. The second station, where the image of the poet Majakovsky and that of General Huerta are seen on the wall, presents a group of young people dancing to revolutionary music next to a basket of red roses, an allegory of existence as the eternal present of the young body, devoted to sacrifice, an image of the uncritical embrace of ideology. In the third station, the elderly Russian film actor Fëdor Fëdorovič Šaljapin, Jr. (Moscow, 1905 – Rome, 1992), who had lived in Rome since after World War II, is sitting in an armchair. The old man recounts his life, which fate has willed to be rich in historical witnessing: he was a child in the court of the tsars, a boy during the October Revolution, in Germany in the 1930s, later in the United States of the New Deal, and then, after the war, in Rome. But for the actor, ‘lived’ by the narratives of which he is a ‘living screen’, events are accidents, instances disconnected from one another. The absence of historical-critical method prevents judgment. Mauri writes:

‘The series of events appears to him in the form of accidents, in inverse proportion to their magnitude. The parts of death to contradict the parts of life, what simply is preferred, esteemed, happy in one or another of the conditions in which the methodless individual feels called to live. As reflected in the consistent witness, memory projects, because it glimpses; only present [...] Without method, history is on loan as to meaning. Without method, in the face of the past-present, the condition of the self is meta-historical.’ ²⁴

Rather than participating in the myth of progress in art, then, the artist's gaze becomes retrospective, even to the point of including an authentic ancient work of art in the 1978 installation I numeri malefici (The Evil Numbers). Presented during that year's Venice Biennale, entitled Dalla natura all’arte. Dall’arte alla natura (From Nature to Art. From Art to Nature), the installation is a reflection on the relationship between art, nature and evil, and the search for a mathematical formula capable of translating and understanding that relationship. In white chalk on a blackboard, Mauri writes a formula, an equation he derived from research on the principle of error. Inside two symmetrical cages, juxtaposed like a teacher’s desk and placed under the formula, is arranged a sound system from which the powerful low notes of an earthquake are transmitted, which bursts into the room and beyond every twenty minutes. Lying on the floor is, in the first version of the work, a portion of a fresco by an artist in the circle of Giotto, Il matrimonio mistico di Santa Caterina di Alessandria (The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, fourteenth century AD); next to it is a black briefcase from which a loudspeaker repeats in various languages the phrase ‘What is nature?’, alternating with the frantic ticking of time passing.

In 1994, in the retrospective exhibition Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni 1954–1994 at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the artist repurposed the work, replacing the fresco with a lithograph by Giorgio de Chirico. Hanging on the wall is a blow-up of a photograph depicting Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels (Rheydt, 1897 – Berlin, 1945) being escorted to the opening of the second Berlin leg of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in 1938.

The rejection of the simplicity of the message, the complexity of levels, the paratactic structure, and the use of emblems, photographic montage, collage of different languages, and rhetorical figures such as allegory, place Mauri's work outside the modernist path and closer to some postmodern experiences of deconstruction and montage, although not in the sense of empty stylistic intertextuality that the term ‘postmodern’ has taken on in Italian cultural debate; closer, if anything, to the meaning given by Frederick Jameson and Craig Owens. ²⁵

The work as a tautological search to understand its own status or as a form of research on visual perception developed in the formalist modernist avant-garde into the criteria of simplicity and reduction. But such criteria were also functionally used by media communication to get simple and direct messages across: inducing consumption, manipulating thought, reinforcing ideologies – the opposite of postmodernist pastiche and resistance to such praise for simplicity.

In one of the few works in the public space that Mauri ever made, therefore, none of the criteria of proper advertising communication was respected by the artist. Insonnia per due forme contrarie di universo (Insomnia for Two Opposite Forms of Universe), was presented in 1978 as part of the N.d.R. event organised by the artist collective Uffici per l’immaginazione preventiva. It consisted of a roadside billboard divided into two parts, where on one side two physical formulas with their respective mathematical curves were represented, and on the other side the image of a man's face divided in half. The left part of this side of the billboard proposes two different models of physical description of the universe, in a state of motion and in a state of stillness. The face on the right side, on the other hand, is the ‘sleepless’ man, split before the impossibility of choosing between the two proposed models. Mauri opts for an intellectual confrontation with passers-by through the proposal of a scientific and philosophical theme that touches at once on physics and metaphysics, in antithesis to the communicative style characteristic of advertising and billboards. He chooses to exhibit in public space an enigmatic image that is difficult to decode.

While one of the founding principles of contemporary art is that mimetic figurative representation is false and inauthentic, Mauri expresses no rejection of mimesis nor of the concept of verisimilitude, because everything in media society is by its nature representation, language, projection. He can use verisimilitude and mimesis in the construction of the objects in Ebrea, just as he can propose as a work an actual religious rite, as in the performance Via Tasso: un appartamento which took place onMarch 24, 1993 in the former Nazi prison in Rome. Thus the different forms of activity, the apparent shift from one issue to another through the years, and from one medium to another even in the same period, is a foundational and programmatic element of Mauri's operation, aimed at restoring the complexity of reality even to his own work as an artist, which should not merge into a utopian total art but maintain precisely the aspect of juxtaposition of elements, both within the individual works (where the subject/object distinction also blurs) and at the existential level of an artist's life. Mauri is against all modernist ‘professionalism’ and ‘specialisation’, which he judges to be forms of falsifying simplification of experience. His is an extreme act of intellectual freedom. It is an anarchic hypothesis, aimed at raising the question of the legitimacy of knowledge and the right of criticism. Complexity also means difference and diversity, unacceptable to the media society that wants homogeneity above all.

In 1979, Mauri began teaching ‘Aesthetics of Experimentation’, a course focused on the history of the avant-garde and aesthetics, at the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila, during which, between theory and laboratory classes, some of his most complex performances were devised, such as Gran Serata Futurista 1909–1930 (Futurist Grand Soirée 1909–1930, 1980) and Che cosa è la filosofia. Heidegger e la questione tedesca. Concerto da tavolo. They were staged together with students. At the same time, the artist took up pencil and brush again: he painted a lot, working almost obsessively on different thematic nuclei, without ever exhibiting these colourful expressionist works during his lifetime. Significantly, in the same years, the neo-expressionist painting of the Transavantgarde was developing in Italy, which may have partly determined this deviation, along with the fact that he was teaching in an academy where younger people often tried their hand at traditional painting and sculpture; it is therefore possible that in this context the artist wanted to return to his own beginnings as a young expressionist painter after World War II.

From 1981 to 1983 he immersed himself tirelessly in the theme of the Apocalypse, producing a series of landscapes of leaden skies with clouds, rays and trumpets looming over desolate moors in which only slender flowers survive. Present in many alchemical works of the medieval period, the flower represents the Apocalypse in its meaning of revelation, the key with which Mauri himself interprets St John's text.

Reflection on historical and contemporary expressionism found its outcome in 1985 in the exhibition, works and book Entartete Kunst, which took its cue from the Degenerate Art exhibition that opened in Munich in 1937 – through which Nazi Germany condemned avant-garde art, and to which Mauri had referred in I numeri malefici.

Shortly thereafter, between 1986 and 1987, the artist worked on the Scorticati (Flayed)series, also not exhibited during his lifetime. The livid, bright colours of the Fauves appear here, sometimes even fluorescent, to describe naked, skeletal, skinless bodies, or figures of Adam and Eve that quote Paolo Uccello's (Pratovecchio, 1397 – Florence, 1475) Peccato originale (Original Sin, 1420–25). The word ‘anguish’ appears in the images, a feeling Mauri experienced in the years of his postwar illness and described many years later: ‘From the stomach rose to the chest more than apprehension, it was anguish. I had never experienced it. A dark feeling blew from the presumable zone of consciousness and enveloped any thought or idea with frost’; ‘I stopped eating and drinking [...] I had become mute. I weighed as much as a Kirchner man could weigh, forty-five pounds, little more.’ ²⁶ Those who know the Mauri of the black and white Schermi, his large-scale performances and installations of the 1980s and 1990s, would not imagine this body of secret works, which were only exhibited after his death.

In the 1990s, with the advent of the digital age, the old despotic television or cinema screens, with their frontal and easily controlled fruition, was overcome. This apparently restored power to the user, who now became responsible for his or her own choices in the labyrinthine path of available information: it really seemed to be on the threshold of the era of free choice. But Mauri already suspected that this was not the case at all. On the cusp of the new century, the artist devoted himself to the elaboration of complex installations where the Schermo returned as a white monochrome with the words senzarte (without art), or in lead, a ductile, malleable material, but dull and dark, certainly not reflective. The pervasive concern of the 1960s and 1970s about the dangers of covert persuasion and consensus manipulation gave way to widespread consideration of supposed, unnecessary alarmism. There was a belief in the effectiveness of mechanisms for verifying the quality of advertised products, in the growth of democracy in parallel with the multiplication of the media, and in the expansion of the possibility of choice resulting from the differentiation of supply. But the possibility of choice, in the context of a widespread multiplicity of messages, presupposes that the subject has the time to devote to analysing the messages themselves, that is, the information, in order to make a cognitive evaluation. What had not been considered was the fact that by now an entire generation, which grew up with television and later with cell phones and social media, had embraced and interiorised the speed imposed by the succession of information and data, necessarily reducing the time to devote to each topic. The ‘television’ subject always had little critical capacity, and less and less time to make use of it. A situation arose again, especially with the advent of the smartphone that integrated computer and telephone into a screen-body prosthesis, in which communication strategies leverage the receiver's peripheral activity, and not his cognitive activity; and this despite the multiplicity of messages.

Mauri's installations in recent years, such as Interno/Esterno, Studenti, Picnic o il buon soldato (Picnic or the Good Soldier, 1998), Istantanea di un duca morto(Snapshot of a Dead Duke, 2003)or Inverosimile (Improbable, 2007), are thus a form of bulky materialisation of large computer databases through which the viewer can walk. One wanders into the rooms as if one were walking inside a labyrinth of directories and files, filled with data. Just as the screen was the place of ‘projective’ communication, so today the place of ‘interactive’ communication is a virtual space into which the receiver wanders, paying time-limited attention to each element. There is no longer ontology, no longer body; one wanders around in an unlit television set, or rather, in an immense archive, full of data and messy traces. One's self (the house, books, etc.), the school, the workshop. Mauri did not experience the advent of artificial intelligence with predictive algorithms, which appeared around 2013–14 and developed after COVID-19, in 2022–24. Who knows what he would have made of the topic of chronic distraction and de-cerebration of people, where human consciousness and its ability to analyse and synthesise are taken away, delegated to prosthetic algorithms and LLMs (Large Language Models)? However, Mauri's work, as always, does not simulate computer communication, but critically deconstructs it and reveals it as potentially dangerous. The observer/actor walks through his last installations of 2008 without any criteria of choice, without being able to decide where to stop and pay attention. If earlier one stood before Ebrea for a long time, observing the nude performance slowly and repetitively acted out, now one walks quickly through a huge mass of elements-objects, furniture, sculptures, paintings, old things and new things-and never gets a complete view, a clear map of the place of communication. The clutter oppresses and causes a loss of sense of direction. ²⁷

In the participatory ideology of the new millennium, it seems that everyone can choose his or her own path, but on closer inspection the new technologies, like all the previous ones, do not automatically allow greater freedom. Similarly, in his works Mauri allows the viewer to move through the labyrinth of the installation – of which he has become an integral part – but, in fact, he denounces an absence of freedom, causes discomfort and a sense of suffocation through an aggressive and dangerous encumbrance. A feeling of frustration lingers, exacerbated by the recurrence of lead and black rubber elements. In Studenti the screen is obtuse, malleable and manipulable, grey and dangerous. The telematic network and AI (artificial intelligence, which Mauri had not seen) is as much a cage as a tool: everything depends, again, on how it is used. ‘Good and evil’, says Mauri, ‘speak the same language’, as indicated by the title of an enigmatic work from 1982, a linoleum matrix print of Hitler's portrait of one of his professors eating an ice-cream cone.

In 1973 Mauri stated that: ‘The formation of an anarchic or continuous oppositional thought, in a rational, conciliatory nature, has been, for me, as long as a lifetime [...] The language of art, I have often had occasion to say, is propositional. It gives objectivity to thought and to all appearance. It enucleates meaning more than science, and perhaps more than philosophy. It makes God, the human, feelings, thoughts, general and particular judgment on the enigma of the universe, stand truthfully. Therefore I call myself an anarchist, therefore I cultivate myself as an artist. Therefore I am against, because I would be in favour.’ ²⁸

In 2005, in Rome, Mauri presented in the corner of a space a banner that read (and it is the title of the work): Convincimi della morte degli altri capisco solo la mia (Convince Me of the Death of Others I Understand Only My Own). Mauri was seventy-nine years old. At the end of his life of intellectual and artistic research, of his anarchic life, he had failed to understand the greatest enigma of the universe: THE END, death, the finality of things. That finitude which, in order to be avoided, in fear of it, turns the human into an agent of Evil – mors tua vita mea.

But in this very work Mauri turns everything upside down through a deeply religious act, the gift that is the work of art. He assumes his own death. THE END.

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