I am leaving aside the many things I have said and written – about Mauri, for Mauri – over the years
1
, to go over with him, in this absent presence of his, some fragments of shared memory: shards that splinter out of the unbroken continuum of an intense friendship, which lasted a quarter of a century under the banner of that noble humility of mutual understanding and listening that only a relationship marked by the axiom of homo homini deus makes possible.
From the very first meeting, I was struck by the intensity of Mauri’s gaze – a gaze-laser attentive to significant particulars, in the firm conviction – endorsed by a famous dictum of Aby Warburg – that ‘God is in the details’ and that only the particular holds within itself the dynamis, the mysterious power of setting a system of signs in motion. That system for Fabio coincides with the subtle weave of which the Great World Code is woven: the familiar and enigmatic web of relationships in which we happen to live.
Hence his persistent reference, sometimes explicit sometimes an undercurrent, to Umberto Eco's Clavis Universalis: the open text does not exist. And even bodies, however assumed in their material plasticity, are ultimately nothing but signs, destined to remain incomprehensible if extrapolated from the fabric of worldly relations and their immanent dynamics: ‘No particular sign of culture’, he once wrote, ‘is outside a general historical text, and no general historical text or interpretation of the world is outside the general enigma of the universe’.
In Mauri's experimentum mundi, the open text is not given except as an excess, a radical questioning of the mystery of existence: of that ‘improbable’ that is our being-in-the-world, the Heideggerian in-der-Welt-Sein. For this, he would sometimes tell me with a look oscillating between polite irony and sincere admiration, that an artist had to be grateful to philosophy for its effort to confer verisimilitude on the improbability that is life. And yet …
And yet Mauri always carefully avoided declining his metaphysical talent in the terms of an aesthetic, in the lucid awareness that that inclined plane would have entailed for thought an inevitable fall in the coefficient of radicality. For this decisive reason, instead of laying hand to a ‘philosophy of art’, he preferred to bet on art as philosophy. If in the rigorous and dazzling trace of his thought, immanence of the world and enigma of meaning, worldliness and mysticism, hold each other, giving rise to a field of constant tension, in his artistic practice (art is for him not contemplation but action) that same tension is resolved in a form at once expressive and alienating. A form by whose means the system of signs in which the Text of the World consists becomes –thanks to a compositional procedure capable of managing and combining multiple techniques – an image of the paradoxical status of normality. The conventions and rituals of the everyday thus come to assume the traits of familiar stranger, of familiar foreignness, assigned by Freudian psychoanalysis to the figure of the ‘uncanny’.
In the Mauri artist's gaze, ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘summits of Culture’ and ‘lowlands’ of everyday life, caught in minute and seemingly insignificant details, hold and mirror each other within the conjuncture of the present: ‘One cannot be uncultured to the point of loving only things of high quality.’ It is difficult, without taking this lapidary observation into account, to appreciate the expressive charge of his works, achieved by orchestrating a plurality of materials, techniques and procedures in a unique and unrepeatable way. The totality of the World is unveiled by a procedure that is not metaphorical but metonymic: transiting not from the whole to the detail, but from the detail to the whole.
All this has to do, once again, with a peculiar power and quality of the gaze, with an ability to observe reality that unhinges the modern regime of perspective by privileging the energetic charge of objects, which thus rise to signs or emblems of a dynamic constellation of the present: mobile indicators of a secret code of memory, nestled in the most intimate folds of actuality. Hence Mauri's stubborn passion for exactitude: the ‘philological’ rigour aimed at the world of objects and bodies (bearing witness to his intense youthful association with Pier Paolo Pasolini). Hence also the almost obsessive fussiness with which he pursues the technical perfection of his compositional, projective and kinetic-dramatic machines (his famous performances).
Another procedure partakes of the same rigour: the skilful play of subtraction in which the excess of the questioning of meaning is expressed by the emptiness, the whiteness of his proverbial screens. On the other pole or side of the representation, the immanence of the World is rendered, as we have seen, by the welding of high and low, in order to grasp the ‘heart of darkness’ of the twentieth century not as an episode of ‘barbarism’ but as a tragedy of Culture.
The way in which the Mauri artist-philosopher aims to remove the removal of the horror of the Shoah by calling into question myths, emblems and symbols of Kultur has no parallel in contemporary art, with the single, conspicuous exception represented by the work of Anselm Kiefer. But unlike Kiefer, who reworks the legacy of the ‘German catastrophe’ with similar radicality, Mauri's tension projects beyond the historical-cultural conjuncture to address the metahistorical theme of the thin shadow line between the two dimensions of good and evil: ‘Good and evil speak the same language. Only the end distinguishes them.’
In the exercise of radical questioning, our intellectual and biographical trajectories met at some point, finding themselves in a shared certainty: that what we do in life echoes in eternity.
However … however, we met. But in forms and ways indecipherable to both of us: both to a non-believer like me and to a man of faith like Mauri, whose proverbial line I can't help but recall: ‘Whoever fails to find infinity can phone me at home.’… However, both of us were – are – aware that the bottlenecks of freedom and contingency (with the mixture of reason and passions, thoughts and loves that animates them), the dangerously minimal margin granted to our experience, to our journey in the world, are representable not with the Euclidean linearity of a uniform rectilinear motion, but rather as curves or ellipses destined to recompose themselves in the mysterious straight line of eternity.
Despite our differences in matters of religion, I think we basically understood the intersection of time and eternity not too differently, if what Mauri once wrote is true: ‘An eternal life is not long, it is a timeless instant.’[n6]
Therefore, whenever I happen to think of Mauri, of our endless conversations and daily passion for multiple forms of operating (artistic, literary, philosophical), his smiling and pensive image does not belong to the past for me.
It does not press behind me like a shadow.
But it is as if it comes to me from the future.
