Sebastiano Mauri has chosen to exercise painting as the physical and psychological means through which he can achieve harmony in this chaotic and extreme world. It is through this medium, and through the creative and aesthetic work it implies, that this artist finds some of the answers he is looking for, to be able to define from the diverse genetic, biological and social interweaving of origins, and the impulses that he answers to, a meaningful profile to represent him. This new series of monochromatic portraits by Mauri go one more step further towards this personal and communal definition within a world in which essential elements are sometimes lost in pointless discussions that blur the very subjects they aim to explain. The artist traces in black pencil on an even coat of acrylic the features he later paints in oil in transparent brushstrokes. In his latest works other canvases of the same shade go next to these portraits, on them you read the one word that defines his characters socially: Muslim, lesbian, etc. Mauri questions these partial definitions that condition the way we see others, and the way others see us. Mauri has avoided every anecdotic detail in these sensual and mysterious portraits. Stripping them of their domestic or professional settings, of their professional tools, of their clothes, of every adornment, even of hair, he counts on his subjects’ features, on the way they look and on the energy they may pass on to us. We do not know for sure what worlds they belong to –we cannot even tell sometimes if they are men or women-, we can tell they are fully alive. Man is a wide range of physical, moral and spiritual qualities that are not described by one definition. The phenomena of multiculturalism latent in the last twenty years, and the political space open to the discussion of conflicting minorities have turned the apparently positive acceptance with a capital A of those different to us into our knowing less about them. That a man or a woman define themselves aggressively from only one datum or quality distorts and belittles the rich and complex structure of our individual identities. We are impoverished by these partial definitions, by these labels. Mauri believes that our social and psychological profile is limited by this apparent acceptance, that represent the Other specifically by this one ethnic, religious, social, moral or sexual aspect. It is only one datum and one quality among other data and qualities that go into the making of an individual’s identity. His portraits devoid of conventional data are far from being dull. The profound meaning of Mauri’s painting stems from this very abstraction.