Fabio Mauri: Retrospettiva a luce solida / Gian Maria Tosatti: Sette Stagioni dello Spirito

Fabio Mauri (1926–2009) is a masterful exponent of the neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century and one of the most seminal Italian contemporary artists, whose practice focuses on the investigation of the mechanisms of ideology, the exploration of propaganda languages, the analysis of collective imagination and of media narrative structures. His works and actions—comprising painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance—explore the European history of the “Short Century” in its conflicts and contradictions. Their intellectual and emotional core coincides with an inquiry into the specifically European subject of ideology, and the intrinsic relationship between history and ethics, as in the tension and recomposition of the personal and collective sphere. Distancing himself from an original affinity with contemporary experiments in Pop Art, Mauri pursued a radical independence, in the attempt to represent thought, unravel the mechanisms of perception (revealing the manipulative strategies or induction mechanisms peculiar to the “society of the spectacle”), and bring out the potential paths of memory or of its systematic repression and remodeling. Retrospettiva a luce solida (Retrospective in solid light) is the most complete exhibition ever devoted, in the last two decades, to the artist. It presents more than a hundred works, actions and documents, in a layout that transforms the whole museum into a critical experience and a multiple structure, where the work is paired with its project, the thought becomes physical and the museum’s white cube merges with the theatrical stage and the black box of the cinema. In this way the exhibition incorporates and conveys the concept of “solid light,” which appears in some of the titles of the artist’s works. Referring to the Futurist Lampadine con i raggi solidificati (Bulbs with Solidified Rays), Mauri gave physical form to the beam connecting the projector with the movie screen, so expressing the idea that all the components of existence are real, hence also thought, imagination and ideology. This reflection, later entrusted to his Schermi (Screens), Proiezioni (Projections), and performative actions, became a metaphor of the relations between mind and world, reality and memory, history and stories. Transforming the Madre museum itself into a theatrical play and a film projector, the exhibition starts on the ground floor of the museum, turned into a veritable Theatrum Unicum Artium (Unique Theater of the Arts) that reconstructs the performative and theatrical matrix of the artist’s practice, with a selection of Mauri’s most important actions. A complementary section on the third floor articulates groups of works that deconstruct the languages of media narratives. The final section of the exhibition in the Columns gallery (first floor) is devoted to the complete oeuvre of Mauri’s architectural models, which reconstruct his principal exhibitions, presented together for the first time in a solo show.

Curated by Laura Cherubini, Vice President, Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee and Andrea Viliani, General Director, Madre Museum.

From 2013 to 2016 Italian artist Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980) involved the whole city of Naples in the multi-year project Sette Stagioni dello Spirito (Seven Seasons of the Spirit). The concept of this project has been inspired by The Interior Castle (1577), the book in which St. Teresa of Avila divides the human soul into seven rooms, transfigured by Tosatti into as many, monumental environmental installations. This was a polysemic work in progressive formation, aimed at redefining the relationship between art and community: an urban, visual and performative novel, which explored the city and the communitarian dimension of civil life, suspended between the antithetical but complementary limits of good and evil. The final exhibition at the Madre museum—conceived as a diary, crammed with notes and erasures, and imagined for the “city and its people”—intends not just to restore the memory connected with this collective experience but also to explore its walkthrough behind the scenes. The exhibition enables the audience to retrace the overall articulation of the project and to recount its intimate dimension, witnessing the overlapping of the decisions and changes, and showing a selection of works alongside preliminary drawings, preparatory sketches, documents and remains. In the Project Room, at the entrance of the museum, the artist presents the floor of his studio during his stay in Naples, together with his diary and a feature film on the process of making this work. The walkthrough on the museum’s second floor, by contrast, is a sequence of seven “mental rooms” embodying the seven themes linked to these Seven Seasons of the Spirit: unawareness, inertia, mistake, salvation, ascension, doing good and destiny.

Curated by Eugenio Viola, Curator at Large, Madre.