Fabio Mauri: The Different

Francesca Alfano Miglietti

‘Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.’

Italo Calvino

Advancing thoughts, works, encounters, speeches, finding the courage to hold back the night, the chance to recreate the world … it is a constant challenge. Contemporary art is unable to live peaceably with the spirit of our age; it has, perhaps, ever been thus. Knowledge is organisation of the past. What art is interested in is total time, not its linear cadencing – total time that in all senses traverses the past, present and future in strange, altered order. Great art has taught us to say, to look, and not to be afraid of appearances, symbols or strategies. Art is not the oasis of the mind, where thought goes to repose.

All Fabio Mauri’s work functions in the dimension of the ‘different’, acting upon the dual dimension of history and language, channelling ideological, spiritual and poetic tensions, choosing complexity and paradox as its method. The story of his works includes the dark challenge of dictatorial motives in the always disturbing game of representation, in a dimension where, without losing any evocative power, symbols are taken for their primary nature, as linguistic signs.

Modern history overload is both difficult and dangerous. Emphasising the concept of the aesthetics of Nazi and Fascist ideology, Mauri’s works break through the rules of repression, preserving recollections of results and methods, an orientation that is a million miles away from today’s glorification of information. Mauri focused on values, on questions constantly pushed aside in a cultural universe where, despite grand statements of openness, even questions could be deemed dangerous. History began when individuals started perceiving the passage of time not merely in terms of natural processes – seasonal cycles, an individual lifespan, etc. – but in reference to a whole series of specific events in which they were consciously involved, over which they could exert active influence. Jacob Burckhardt writes that history is ‘caused by the awakening of awareness’: the transformation of the modern world stemmed from the development of self-awareness. Mauri chose to explore the dimension of history associated with one of the events that significantly and irreversibly transformed humanity. Over the years, his work became a regular attack on cultural vulgarity showcased through endless superficial, comfortable, conformist debates.

We may still not realise the extent to which, during its post-war years, Italy was influenced by its Fascist past. The situation generated tacit, ongoing tension, only occasionally yielding to actual accountability. Mauri demonstrated that the closing years of the last century were in part notable for a lack of reflection on the past; a past suspended, often denied. ‘Accounts’ were settled, yes, but only partially so and, perhaps, too late. In his works and writings, Mauri ‘narrated’, along the lines of the Frankfurt School, the way in which Western society and doctrines referring back to Reason had failed to achieve their goals. His originality and the power of his works lie in his contrasting methods and approaches to issues. He selected certain historically living constellations of difference and demonstrated the forms they took, both through the immediacy of historical processes and in subsequent decades. In this too, Mauri belongs to the category of the different alongside figures from myth and destinies generated by tension and conflict, articulating such differences in tangible form. He successfully mapped out a history of difference, having realised that the terms of the matter – identity and difference – had to be inverted: in reality, identity derives from difference, not the other way around.

History has two aspects, in my opinion: the epic and the domestic. Mauri combined the two, referencing ‘unchanging’ middle-class life, trips to the seaside and to blockbusterart exhibitions, furnishings and everyday objects. He was aware that in our culture, the numbers of which we are most in need, the numbers we remember, are not the numbers of major historical events; for us, numbers symbolise codes, not dates. The historical dimension appearsin Mauri, yet it does so in a way that makes historical values more problematic or even null, the conflicts inherent to European culture replaced by the communications universe, allowing postmodernism to emerge, and hence codes, inscriptions, dates and events become decorations.

Mauri’s theoretical horizon became a focus on event, onits relationships with ethics. For Gilles Deleuze, rather than transcendent values based on Good and Evil inherent to Morality, Ethics encompasses immanent values of the individual based on the Good and the Bad. Leveraging this distinction, Deleuze maps out a difference between ‘Ethics and Morality’:

‘Either morality makes no sense or it is precisely what it means, it has nothing else to say: do not be unworthy of what happens. Conversely, to perceive what happens as unjust and undeserved (it is always someone’s fault) is what makes our wounds revolting, personified resentment – resentment against the event. There are no other evil wills. What is truly immoral is any use of moral notions, right, wrong, merit, blame. What might willing an event even mean? Does it perchance mean to accept war when it happens, wounds and death when they occur? Resignation is still very likely a figure of resentment which, in truth, has many figures. If to will an event is primarily to free its eternal truth like the fire that fuels it, such will reaches the point where war is waged against war, wounds, a living trace like the scar of all wounds, willed death turning against all deaths. Volitional intuition and transmutation […] Nothing changes in a certain way except a change of will, a leap of the whole body on the spot, bartering its organic will for spiritual will, one that now does not exactly want what happens, but something ‘in’ what happens; something future in accordance with what happens, in accordance with the laws of dark, humouristic conformity: the Event. In this sense, ‘Amor fati’ is one with the struggle of free men. May my unhappiness be in every event, and also the splendour and brilliance that dry the unhappiness and ensure that, when wanted, the event takes place at its narrowest tip, on the blade of an operation, such is the effect of static genesis or immaculate conception. The brilliance, the splendour of the event is its meaning. The event is not what happens (occurrence), it is in what happens, the pure expression that signals to us, that awaits us.’ ¹

For Mauri, the term ‘event’ has a philosophical, religious, historical sense. It is, more generally, imbued withthe characteristic of the private. An event is an association of real occasions in mutual relation to a specific approach: for example, a molecule is a historical sequence of real occasions; this sequence is an event. Now, movement of the molecule is nothing but the difference between the successive occasions of its life story; changes in the molecule are the consequential difference of real occasions.

Mauri’s explicit commitment and research into the ideological, cultural, social and political context of the world that surrounded him, deeply conditioned many years of his artistic journey. His works and actions went beyond the traditional boundaries of art to approach the realms of real life, in many instances explicitly tackling the most pressing issues of the day, whether political struggles or debates on civil and social themes, ethical problems or social tensions.

In the 1970s, Mauri’s work embarked on a quest for unconscious ideology with a hidden purpose: suppression. Suppression was the true core of the historical story. Mauri bridged that gap anew, reconnecting the timeline that influenced and changed European culture. History and nature comprised a story that, given its great transformative power, could lead to the realms of terror. Like some listless spaceship after having delivered its cargo to another time, to another dimension, he undertook a transposition of times and spaces.

Switching horizons, Mauri’s use of words in works was also of primary importance. In wall works, posters, floor strips or doormats, he focused not only on the non-syntagmatic spatialism of his texts but on their typographic presentation, the words visually embracingepistemological issues. His entire oeuvre became a strong statement on the drama and nightmares of modern times, of the twentieth century, emphasising an aspect of the imaginary, drawing attention to our culture and its historical fabric.

The word ‘ideology’ refers to the ‘science of ideas’, their origin, formation and ways of being associated. However, in its more current meaning, it delineates a system of principles and general doctrinal and programmatic orientations that provide the inspiration for a political movement – using such principles for persuasion and propaganda-related purposes. More broadly, ‘ideology’ represents a general way of thinking, creating doctrines corresponding to a specific era, expressing the positions, interests and aspirations of a certain class at a given historical moment. Ideology thus manifests itself as idea and knowledge. For Mauri, this awareness became a starting point. Deploying the language of ideology, he sought to overturn this specificity, to turn it into a transformational strategy by adopting alternative cultural models capable – eventually – of overwhelming operational approaches. Based on a diversification of intellectuals’ role and, therefore, function, understood as false consciousness, in Mauri’s poetics ideology is a medium for developing potential relationships between intellectuals and the social context. A reversal of this required poetic models capable of countering the continuous destruction of judgement-based awareness, as conveyed via the channels of communication.

For Mauri, the significance of creating art lay in the difference between ‘seeing’ (vedere) and ‘showing’ (far vedere), both of which were constants in his reflections. He emphasised the need for images that the viewer could fully understand, offering the opportunity to move their eyes, as if looking at a screen. He also highlighted the necessity for images to form freely in the viewer’s mind, enabling us to engage in imaginative or reminiscent activities or, in whatever way, participate emotionally. Mauri’s Screens invite a gaze that is the inevitable counterpart to a pieta, prompting us to identify while very much maintaining a distance. A piece of the puzzle from another time and another life takes shape before our eyes, highlighting the discomfort of ‘out-of-place’ presence.

In Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, ² French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas described Nazism as an ‘awakening of elementary feelings’. If the history of Europe is an eternal battle of the soul against bodily power, he argued, then Nazism is the ultimate victory of such power, a constant ‘returning of man to his original condition’. While Lévinas believed Nazism was a ‘revolt against Western civilisation’, Karl Lowith ³ considered Nazism to be a ‘moral disease’, the result of a nihilistic view of life that swallowed bourgeois society whole, destroying the very idea of humanity. Mauri explored how this ideology manifested historically, and its subsequent repercussions in realms both artistic and political. For him, an artwork was a question-based project. By reintroducing and utilising the aesthetics and propaganda of Fascism, Nazism, racism and anti-Semitism, Mauri’s artworks appeared to revisit fragments of the past, to make them resonate with contemporary events. His entire artistic oeuvre emphasised the same themes. He undertook far-reaching critical analysis of the creation mechanisms that underpinned the visual languages behind the rise of those regimes between World War I and II. He delved into the Holocaust’s lasting impact on the modern world, and reflected on his own personal journey.

The aesthetic of totalitarian regimes and tools of mass manipulation, their terrifying message specifically grounded in the artistic and the aesthetic, was a repeated subject for study for Mauri, as in his exploration of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition staged by Joseph Goebbels in 1937–38. His analysis of ideology, Fascism, Europe and Germany was not just timely back then; it is still critically essential today. ‘What is Germany?’ Mauri asked. ‘And Europe? What does it mean to be European? Was the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s not Europe? I believe it was. I believe that Germany’s nature (the culture of its nature) is closely related to European identity.’ ⁴

He dove deep into the relationship between reality and representation, homing in on the aesthetics of those totalitarian regimes (as a distortion of reality) as the focal point of many of his works. His Che cos’è il fascismo (What is Fascism) (1971) performance, in which he re-evoked the Ludi Juveniles (Youth Games) as well as rituals from gymnastics and verbal and sports competitions on a large mat displaying a swastika, became a cornerstone of his oeuvre.

The artwork gradually began to fade. A formation nebulous in shape and perception replaced the obviousness of the vision: a scattered formation, dense in qualities, seemed – at first glance – to be devoid of identity and connections. Alongside a ‘loss of centre’ in Mauri’s works, other forms of centrality begin to emerge. This was not in any way a new phenomenon in art; what was new, however, was our awareness of it, its ‘discovery’ as it slowly rose to our attention. These new centralities reject the centre, branching out in connecting segments. This is how they represent non-permanent, unstable and predominantly nomadic centralities, focused more on distance than on fixed points of settlement. The situation continues to evoke feelings of disorientation and, at times, disbelief. It is amidst this tangle of emotions that we recognise art. The objects Mauri chose and ‘brought back to this world’ clash with objects subject to the logic of fashion or media overexposure. They are the very opposite of objects shorn of the aura of lived experience, drifting, as Guy Debord would have it, into mere ‘representation’, characteristic of the ‘society of the spectacle’, marking the beginning of a new ‘landscape of dispersion’.

Art often foreshadows what is only later ‘discovered’ through discipline-based knowledge. Mauri often handleddifferent visions of the atopical as a figure of absence and the unknown, with regard to which the tools of observation and understanding often proved inadequate. Focusing on his Schermi entails, first and foremost, bringing into focus the visible characteristics of profound change wrought by contemporary dispersion, prompting his attempt to describe the ‘various and different’ forms of discomfort. To describe from this perspective – the trail that Mauri blazed – is to pose a problem to solve; that is, to seek a cognitive experience that opens up new perspectives to our vision. And yet it is also an attempt to exhaust a topic, to describe its components and articulations.

With Mauri, the main challenge is to attempt to read, interpret – sometimes decipher – typologies, morphologies and aggregations that at first glance seem to be devoid of any relation. It therefore becomes necessary to flip the viewpoint. What is required is a methodological inversion of how the problem is framed: these images and these ‘perceptive combinations’ highlight the fact that, in Mauri’s works, the emphasis is never limited merely to constructing atlases of morphologies and typologies; the works become ‘conductive bodies’; they open up to other vectors of analysis and communication, allowing themselves to be traversed, embracing other approaches to description, accommodating other perspectives. They always become a matrix of fluid lists, of flexible and open mutual acknowledgements. There it is, the work, close to us yet far away. An ‘alternate’ emphasis therefore opens up to a cognitive dimension, a sensitive dimension, one that is not unambiguous and generalising but based as much on logic as on creativity and invention (understood as an intertwined approach).

When it comes to Mauri, this is precisely what ‘difference’ means. The different is not others, it is those who place themselves in a state of isolation. Instances of the different, alienation and isolation abound in the realms of literature; in Kafka, for example, it is guilt that sets this absurd process of ‘voluntary’ segregation in motion, an entirely unknown guilt, a penalty to be atoned for, an ‘innate’ fault. Kafkaesque man is haunted by an unknown force, the sort of revelation that prompts a person’s very being to self-alienate; a condition of the absurd, a condition of salvation that makes one even more vulnerable to the judgements of others. The elements, characters and objects that Mauri selected seem to enact a shift or a deviation in gaze, evoking the presence of an event that fractured their relationship with the world, making them lose the ability to identify with a specific role. Pursued through meaningful experiences, they tend to create an additional viewpoint, a search for identity, a ‘screen’ on which the conditions for vision become possible.

The end of theory led to a concealment of theorists, the people who might somehow crystallise ideas and hypotheses plucked deep from the well of aesthetics; only around theories do projects and decisions solidify. In 1980, Philippe Sollers wrote: ‘Theory will return, like all things, its problems will be rediscovered the day when ignorance has reached the point where nothing but boredom arises.’ ⁵ By definition, theories are brought into being as acts of opposition. Mauri’s lost, multiplied ‘reality’ was an act of opposition, a process that, like some massive mental atlas, generated visions and theories, encompassing data, thoughts, insights, grand narratives, drawings, notes, fragments, works, performances, information and deformations, all arranged like secrets on sheets of paper and in space. These notes and fragments oppose the primacy of unity and identity, having chosen the instability and pitfalls of multiplicity, of the different, of becoming.

Mauri’s path was, it seems, an oeuvre made up of bodies, ideas and stances that prioritise image transparency over the mystifications of word; one that, above all, prefers the clarity of representation to the falsity of staging, becoming the mediator of a specific and objective gaze. His work appeared to address the issue of adopting a phenomenological perspective that, while simultaneously crafting the appealing coordinates of a dynamic and elliptical narrative that dissected, manipulated and refined reality itself, maintained the spatio-temporal continuity of reality. In lieu of the absolute ‘fullness’ of representation-as-emptiness, Mauri seemed increasingly to realise that, even in daily life, the contemporary could no longer represent reality. We may sense painful realisation in his works: the loss of the image’s sacredness, distrust in its capacity for communication. Mauri highlighted the perils of an uncontrolled proliferation of images in our civilisation, the risk that being obsessed with reproducing reality might result in an inability to see reality at all, highlighting the need to set moral boundaries for visual reproduction.

Which brings us to Mauri’s Schermi, or Screens. All his work was specifically positioned at the critical juncture of change, in the intermediary phase of turbulence en route to a new view of reality, seeking to rebalance after previous certainties had been lost. Crisis and the challenging transition toward a new balance are issues that appeared with regularity in every piece of his work. Mauri seemed to wish to emphasise the crisis that stems from our mental model and observed reality coming into conflict – a crisis accompanied by visual and psychological difficulties that could only be resolved by updating our mental model. This is the point at which complicity kicks in: the broader relationship between reality and image, pivoting on dichotomies like motion/stillness, authenticity/fiction, life/work and public/private. Mauri focused on the mechanism of the gaze, on the issues of vision and perception of the world.

One key element of Mauri’s work was reflecting on the fundamental characteristics of the contemporary world through the historical aspects of reality – reality characterised by going beyond the modern era’s claim of establishing a singular sense of the world based on metaphysical, ideological or religious principles. Prior to current times, the modern era sought to explain the world by applying unitary principles that encapsulated the meaning of all reality within a single principle. The contemporary era is characterised by the crumbling of such steadfast certainties. The unravelling of the illusion, of apportioning a unified meaning to reality, led to the emergence of diverse meanings – indeed, to the emergence of an irreducible diversity; reality as difference, a change unconfinable to within a single framework. Such was the horizon of Mauri’s work – its being different – the insight that every attempt to firmly establish an ethics by tying it to whatsoever foundational law was doomed to fail because irreducible difference prevented truly finding a stable, absolute sense of ‘everything’ that had once been the claim and primary project of philosophies past.

Alongside the power of presence and the overwhelming power of absence, in all his works Mauri seems to ‘safeguard’ a characteristic of the profound melancholy of an artist who found the secret of artwork in the darkness and obscurity of metaphysics, pushing the reasons that underlie ethics to the extreme. The intricate aesthetic and theoretical framework behind all of his exhibitions recalls the definition of the classic. In late Latin, the term ‘classic’ denoted excellence in its class; in Romanticism, it came to mean a tangible form transformed to reach the dimension of the self-aware mind; hence, the classic becomes a place where the idea of infinity finds its ideal form. ‘Classic’ primarily meant something that keeps the history of which it speaks alive, not to mention the figure it portrays: alive, in the sense of that which comes back to life through reason and melancholy in a new eternity, a new universe and language.

Any discussion of Mauri inevitably leads to speaking of forms of language, the metalinguistic narration of conceptual journeys in their most important and expressive form, as an artwork, as a means of sharing with others. He authored his story and directed his journey, constantly engaging with the audience despite the pitfalls of dialogue. His art-making methods continuously shifted and expanded from theoretical to aesthetic elements. His bond with his works was based on awareness. His world was a perpetual exploration of the potentialities of language and artwork. He wrote, painted, used photographs (by others, not his own, as he specified), projected films onto objects and things, engaged with ideology, aesthetics, theology and science, adopted real objects and people rather than their representations. His powerful poetics rested on memory, highlighting its contradictions, paradoxes and labyrinthine nature – conceptual tools rather than mental archetypes that possess something more relentless and merciless per se than one may imagine. He did not depict innate human tendencies in his works, nor inevitable conjectures of cosmic time or the madness of a moment. His deployed the strategies of a wordsmith, a strategist of ideas and images, capturing meanings, feelings and syntheses of ideas, culminating in an epic tone.

Mauri’s skill and clarity lay in uncovering latent expressions in syntactic, scientific, political evolution, aligning them based on the principle of germination and preservation, culminating in memory, presence and relationships with others. He used metaphor in an Aristotelian manner to discover seemingly implicit connections between things. This rhetorical cipher allowed him to attribute the repetitiveness of events and their substantial immutability to the manner in which they are represented. If things always manifested differently due to the attributes used, sophistry and allegory allowed him to express simultaneity in specific states of grace for the observer, to deceive the observer into believing there was a possible history of a knowledge-based process. The translatability and communicability of experience seemed illusory in Mauri’s works. Conceptualised or imagined reality, communicable reality differed from phenomenological reality sensed as proximate. Thus language took on a more ethereal quality, positing reality as a mediated fact of consciousness, expressed through forms of communication that lose their primary contact with reality.

Mauri’s drawings were, in mode and theme, entirely different. He expressed his creative fortitude most effectively through all the many drawing techniques he used, in which his hand and sign were free and immediate. Perhaps paper and drawing lay at the heart of everything: the starting point for creating paintings, sculptures, installations and performances, as well as being a highly versatile raw material that, through drawing (plus solitude), he transformed into prints, photomontages, three-dimensional objects, collages, designs and paper-based artworks. So vast and original was his output that it can seem endless. He drew constantly, with such confidence in his hallmark style that with a single line he could bring a full figure to life as few other artists could. His was an essential, precise, sharp line, curved and modulated without hesitation, in various materials like graphite, pencil, pen, ink, pastels and charcoal. Drawing a line symbolised the duality he felt between artwork and drawing: Christ and the apocalypse, flayed figures, dogs, horses, nudes and horizons. He used a highly diverse range of media too: illustrated books, notebooks, personal letters, postcards, posters for his exhibitions, newspaper cutouts and white, coloured, and black sheets.

‘No thinker has ever entered into another thinker’s solitude’, wrote Heidegger. ‘Yet it is only from its solitude that all thinking, in a hidden mode, speaks to the thinking that comes after or that went before. The things which we conceive and assert to be the results of thinking are the misunderstandings to which thinking ineluctably falls victim. Only they achieve publication as alleged thought, and occupy those who do not think.’ ⁶ Mauri’s drawings seem to emerge from deep solitude. It was as if it were in the drawings that Mauri met other artists: Duchamp, Picasso, animals and plants and faces, apocalypses, planes and far-off views.

His drawings often felt alien, even in relation to his own creations. His works on paper were streams of desire and obsession, beyond any distinction of subject/object, self/world, daytime rules/nighttime chaos. Mauri was a ‘lover of knowledge’, choosing the dispersion of an initial thought, always prompting a rethink, finding a method perhaps more fruitful than the original thought. He acknowledged that the present-day is a kind of ‘collage’ on the plane of consequentiality that issues out of dispersion, out of the Western subject’s fragmentation in the face of ideological and historical-led challenges, from what has seemed like a slow fade papering over a break in thought.

He experimented with numerous techniques, combining pencil, chalk, charcoal, watercolours, straw-dripped or pen-produced drinks, alternating media and layering different materials to create an inventive graphic vocabulary, bold in syntax, highly refined for styling based on subject, mood and desired atmosphere. Albeit often associated with his artworks – many are preparatory studies – Mauri’s paper works stand out for their distinct autonomy. Whether depicting faces, objects or landscapes, they emphasise forms and sculpted volumes, giving figures clear, obsessive definition. Spontaneous and exaggerated, his drawing style and his personal approach to line and colour enabled him to express his personal feelings on paper; feelings he censored in his installations.

A solitary and controversial thinker, Mauri conceived art as radical demystification, posing questions on ontology (the theory of substance), epistemology (the theory of ideas) and political anthropology (the theory of modes, passions and actions). His poetics sought to forge a link between different dimensions, such as speculative affirmation, the univocity of Being, the production of truth, the genesis of meaning in the theory of ideas, the creation of baseness, selective organisation of individuals, the theory of God, and mechanisms of knowledge. Independent to the point of bordering on obsession, his thought relied on an idea of expression to shape a methodology, assigning a new structure to the idea of the work, the thing that perhaps constituted the heart of his thinking and style. This, too, was one of the secrets to his difference.

Mauri continued his more-than-human, dizzying investigation of the ineffable through drama and beyond, including in his drawings and works on paper the tension towards the perfect form, the circle, blaring trumpets, symbols drawn from sacred history, the subversion of vision, formulae of pathos, postures, the iconography of skeletons and their neon colours, the Baroque, Picasso and animals and nudes and Christ and the hostof true love. ‘Rarely have we seen good and evil so close, without hardly noticing. A beautiful and horrible nakedness. Good and evil speak the same language.’ ⁷

The language of Mauri’s fragmented universe accesses the great deception of history, denouncing the truths of reason and the reality of a world in which words themselves express nothing more than what they can; that is, concepts supporting action. A strong, subversive charge emerges from his poetics. His labyrinths and paradoxes uncover the deception of rationality, the centre around which his elaborations and the man-world relationship rotate as behaviour; indeed, for Mauri, the term ‘rationality’ has two meanings: on one hand, rationality is critical spirit; on the other, it is the logical organisation of knowledge. Thus, rationality presupposes the use of complementary principles or arguments, including competing or antagonistic ones.

Mauri is an artist, of this we may be sure. With him, everything became artistic material: his personal history, ideology, politics, philosophy, science, aesthetics... Spheres he approached (or was approached by) became materials to use on a par with collages, photography, objets trouvées, performance, projections, drawing, painting, sculpture and installation; materials with which he had a physical relationship, a hand-to-hand clash capable of giving birth to a unique and personal encounter, from which Mauri allowed an external gaze to take shape. His works share a common tone, a stance, a demeanour, a smattering of secrets and a point of observation.

In all Mauri’s works, the value lies in critical efficacy vis-à-vis reality itself, in deploying opposition to attempts to reduce language to a mercantile unit of information. Through experimentation with strict rules, his works brought into being new articulations of language; throughout his output, we may perceive an original fragmentation of culture and an almost obligatory analytical separation of life; we may perceive chasms between the discourses of science, ethics and politics and the needs of being. Drawing on these perceptions, he appears to ponder the best way to re-establish unity between these spheres of human existence.

Bordering on mysticism, convinced that art was an adventure in a ‘known’ world, one that may only be revealed by those willing to take the risk, Mauri identifies people by name and surname in his works; personal and collective history merge into a flow of elementary particles in search of an individual’s consistency. Every work thus becomes tension generated by transition. Body, object, word, screens, his way of arranging the audience, all these elements acquire rare power; everything seems to move away from matter to become work. It consequently seems as if there is no hope in history, even if it may still exist in dialectics or in art, in ethics and in aesthetics.

A great interpreter of his day, an irregular if not downright heretical artist, Mauri deployed a metalanguage that, in turn, may be explained by another language, which thus also becomes metalanguage, and so on until we realise no language was ever deployed. With Mauri, there is no option of stepping outside the discourse and adopting a position of invulnerability. Every type of discourse, including discourses related to critical investigation, are equally metaphors, citations, echoes and references, freeing the viewer to sit down or quickly pass through the work’s meaning processes obliviously. Because each work possesses a difference, attempts to find a structure are futile. From the beginning, Mauri has shown us that, just like thought, any work is unstable. Any work needs strategies, corrections, adjustments and self-regulation; reduction to a coherent system of ideas of reality that he sought to describe as both impossible and pointless.

Knowledge was not a reflection of the world for Mauri. Every piece of knowledge is at one and the same time a construction and a translation: for Mauri, knowledge is the work.

His discourse of difference addressed an alienated society, one that, through photography, cinema and television, produced commodified images of itself. An artwork could escape the mechanics of habitual perception, capturing a fresh and inspired way of seeing and connecting with reality. His work is a direct gaze on the audience, testifying to our existence in the world. His creation of image was dominated by vision, a gaze that had to be pure to truly access the reality of the image, freed from cognitive organisation and expectation. Sometimes, Mauri’s notations seemed simple enough: an ensemble of scattered events, more intuitive than organised. Only occasionally did they relate to established disciplines. Grouped under ‘miscellaneous’, they formed unique areas of limited understanding. Still, if given attention, they held potential insights. These trivial facts, often overlooked and deemed insignificant, described us even when we believed there was no need to be described. They provided sharper insights than many institutions and ideologies typically relied upon by sociologists. They connected to our bodies’ history, to the culture that shaped our actions and attitudes, to the education that moulded our physical and, no less, mental conduct. Walking, dancing, running, jumping, different resting modes, transportation techniques and throwing: for Mauri, every work was an act. He made the theme of absence a central aspect of his work, emphasising events of slow or sudden disappearance and efforts at recovery. His obsessive fascination with ‘objects’ provided a way in to this perceptual puzzle. He lavished extreme attention on describing everyday objects, especially those on the margins, meticulously presenting and exhibiting them.

And yet, despite the apparent neutrality of a gaze seemingly detached when capturing the surface – in the strictest sense – of reality in its tiniest aspects, seldom considered by History and only occasionally by literature, even here the artistic result was a profound connection with the essential human narrative and experience. Things were evoked and described deeply, leveraging memory as the indispensable tool, especially the kind that embraces what Georges Perec calls the ‘infraordinary’: ‘trying to grasp not what official (institutional) discourses call the event, the significant, but what lies beneath, the infraordinary, the background noise that constitutes every moment of our daily lives’. ⁸ This underlying theme formed the focus of a daily practice that neither History nor Literature addresses, one that is therefore closely linked to memory, what has been termed ‘dizzying taxonomy’: frequent reference to objects that instantly determine a situation.

Mauri metabolised and recreated a vast narrative repertoire, suggesting revelation, connection, the ultimate meaning of his work. For him, if things and objects were activating tools and, at the same time the subjects of memory, describing the world and reconstructing identity, then the act of listing them, of remembering them all, without exception, became essential to safeguarding reality and personal identity. What emerged was the anxiety of loss, of disappearance. So as not to irreparably lose oneself, listing and describing emptiness and death emerge as the protagonists of his work, playfulness transformed into an imagery of the abyss. The essence of his work was, therefore, a meticulous attempt to hold onto something, to allow something to endure. And, starting with his own experiential elements, Mauri began questioning his personal history, seeking to understand how much ‘great’ History had invaded, overwhelmed and significantly moulded him: being different was initially ‘the sign of an absence, of a lack, or perhaps of omnipotence’.

In a quote seemingly written for Mauri, Jean Genet wrote: ‘I wanted, by expressing it [the poem], to rid it of the power that objects, organs, materials, metals, and humours, to which, for so long, worship was rendered (diamonds, purpure, blood, sperm, flowers, banners, eyes, gold items, nails, crowns, necklaces, weapons, tears, autumn, wind, chimeras, rain, sailors, crêpe) and to rid myself of the World they symbolize (not what they express, but what they evoke and in which I become entrapped). [...] Can an art be born just to guard, like a reliquary, facts that, themselves, would be the first to wish to forget?’ ⁹

The Mauri of installations and performances was very different from the Mauri of his paper works. For Mauri, drawing seemed to function as a research method and, at the same time, a free zone for visionary quality. Specifically and once again, this duality highlights his inclination not to regiment himself into anything dogmatic and definitive. ‘Presence’ would seem to be the most appropriate term to describe his output in terms of style, meaning and intention. Indeed, if all else is absent, what remains of Mauri’s works, if not their very presence – physical and evident – within the real world?

Mauri’s significance is not to be sought in interpretations external to the works, but in their very existence, in their being in this world. They are not images representative of some other reality, they are independent realities in themselves; in other words, the portion of reality that enters the work is made up of the work itself. After all, these works speak of reality, not through interpretations or superstructures, approaches or interpretive models that inevitably preclude accurate knowledge, but simply by existing. To appreciate his works, one must renounce any preconceived notions (especially regarding things like figuration, abstraction, representation or interpretation) and allow oneself to be carried away by the game of discovery, simply enjoying the encounter.

The pressing ethical urgency of world issues was not something Mauri could ignore; for him, a loss of speech was also a loss of vision. It was not necessarily about discussing politics in standard, customary terms, even if there can be no doubt that art is a ‘political act’ for creating an image of the self and of the collective. The reason for this lies in the very objective of the work of art, conceived as a means to arouse powerful and complex emotions. Romantic, mythical, fractured, projected, dematerialised: a body of art that heralds an aspiration to a vision beyond the production of the artistic object to manifest itself as a gesture in the dimension of existence. If you will, the corpus of Mauri’s work becomes a symbol, a process through which energies are discharged in instinctively poetic behavioural forms. Each and every work of his is a ‘trend’, a score in which behaviour, instinct and language unite, in which vision is no longer just an expressive medium for art but an object of aesthetic creation.

Mauri’s work is writing in itself, a system of signs poetically translating the need for an endless search for the Other (to oneself). The boundary between visible and invisible is no longer a boundary between matter and spirituality; it is a gesture, a formula, an audio track or a projection. Vision itself changes ... Focusing on the sensory sphere’s processes of becoming, of decomposing and recomposing matter, evoking the slippage of a viewpoint onto deeper, more intimate materiality, the invisible lies not just in the realm of the spiritual: the fabric of matter and its movement is invisible.

For Mauri, memory represented an unmoving starting point for summing up not just and only his own experience, but his knowledge too, springing from the wellhead of memory like a flash, a bolt of truth through the shadows of history. For Mauri, memory was a gnoseological starting point, a primary truth about the world and oneself, the place on which to build knowledge, as well as a consciousness capable of recognizing the principles of discernment. Memory, for Mauri, ‘quivers’.

NOTE

Gilles Deleuze, Logica del senso, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2011, pp. 133–34.

Emmanuel Lévinas,Alcune riflessioni sulla filosofia dell’hitlerismo, Quodilibet, Macerata, 2012, p. 96.

Karl Löwith, Significato e fine della storia, Edizioni di Comunità, Milan, 1963, cited in Norberto Bobbio, Dialogo sul male assoluto, MicroMega 2/2010, p. 83.

Fabio Mauri, ‘Che cosa è la filosofia. Heidegger e la questione tedesca. Concerto da tavolo’, in Francesca Alfano Miglietti (ed.), Scritti in mostra. L'avanguardia come zona 1958–2008 il Saggiatore, Milan, 2008, p. 75.

Philippe Sollers, Théorie d’ensemble, Seuil, Paris, 1968, p. 107.

Martin Heidegger,Che cosa significa pensare? (1954), Sugarco, Milan, 1996, p. 37.

Fabio Mauri, cited in Francesca Alfano Miglietti (ed.), il Saggiatore, Milan, 2008

Georges Perec, L’infra-ordinario, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 1994, p. 72.

Jean Genet, Miracolo della rosa, il Saggiatore, Milan, 2019, p. 245.