The problem of identity goes through the whole work of Sebastiano Mauri (Milano, 1972). An individual can put up with several simultaneous adjectives and maybe none of them can define him/her as a person in an absolute way. Mauri makes us almost automatically think about prejudices that affect us and (dangerously) restrict us in the way we relate to others, through his artistic practice and the different media where he works: painting, photography and video.
In his recent paintings, we find, over a flat monochrome surface, faces that are free of situational context; there are not even hairstyles or outfits that help us guess or, as he would put it, “label them”. The artist expects his audience to relate to these “pure faces” in an exclusively pre-social human level. The question whether this is possible arises. Whereas desire of objectivity is a Utopia, maybe the impossibility to know the other or about the other through external data is also an Utopia, although we must admit that there may be a thin line between what we could call “knowledge about the other” and ”prejudice”. Undoubtedly, this is what Mauri attempts to draw attention to. Mauri himself states that these paintings are the opposite to portraits, in which the background where the painted person is set is the way of weighing his/her status.
With a different treatment and aesthetics approach, identity is taken up again in The song I love to regarding love stereotypes and commonplaces we have incorporated. The video confirms, or surprises us by undermining, our prejudices and beliefs about what love is for each age group, society or social group, ethnic group, gender. Looking at the camera for one minute and choosing one’s favorite love song, were the instructions given to each of the more than 90 people featured in this video. Mauri filmed disparate people, generally encountered in the streets of New York, Milano and Buenos Aires, in apparently random backgrounds, but where actually nothing was left to chance. Later he added as soundtrack to each one minute portrait the love song each person had chosen, his/her favorite love songs.
This work, based on such an apparently simple idea, generates a very strong intimacy between the audience and each character; it tells us a lot of each one of them, bringing us microscopically nearer, almost to the person’s point of view shot, with specific information and minor elements provided us during 30 seconds of organized coordinates. Thus, social status indicators of nineteenth-century portraits are not what tells us about the character’s status; it is rather the artist who, in an unsuspected way, strips each “painted individual” to his image and chosen song, and when we say “strips” we are obviously referring to something far beyond the physically evident. The fact that we all have our own favorite love song is something we may imagine, but we never materialize in a representation that, when showing ordinary subjects, works as a neutralizer of every type of appreciative intimacy. Maybe this is so because the awareness of the possibility of love and pain being massive may kill us. The media definitely diminishes the anguish for loss when faced with the unfortunately high number of victims the world produces per second. It is in this sense that the amplified microcosm of local pain is excruciating. And Mauri puts the microphone where the heart beats, not where it has stopped beating, and the sound’s insanity means symphony and hope. It is probably because of this that his work is so clearly productive in sociopolitical terms. This is confirmed by the form of reproduction that the artist foresaw for his material: infinite number of copies, infinite will of reproduction, Utopian flow of the discourse of love.
And almost (but not only) as a summary of the above, in his installation Shadow of Doubt, Mauri projects on two of his paintings of faces, out of focus video close-ups that merge one after the other. In this way, while the characteristics of the painted faces remain constant, the video projected characters are superimposed so that they modify “the outline”, i.e., hairstyles, facial shapes, skin color, age. All the levels of interpretation described above meet and converge in this work, but we cannot help feeling that there is something else, as if the resources in his previous works used in this one had boosted and burst, becoming a new whole with a different irreverent attitude, not so controlled; that continues drawing attention on values to stand for, socially and politically productive, but that can become disturbing at the same time. The superimposed drawing on the projected face turns every face into a grotesque mask that is also threatening in a hard-to-identify point. The thing is that this threat is related to the feeling of “the uncanny” that arises when we doubt about something or somebody’s humanity. If in Mauri’s previous video, Faded, the doubt was located in the limit between the human and the animal, in Shadow of Doubt, the doubt is related to the limit between the human and the mask. A somewhat scary, but also ridiculing, mask. We dare to say that, under the ridiculing veil, deep pain can be sensed, which, almost as every other deep pain, has to do with love.
Profoundly poetic and compromised to an ennobling of human essence beyond every prejudice, the work of Sebastiano Mauri appears before us as an invitation to aesthetically reflect on our own nature.