22 September - 30 November 2013

I have never loved the soldier.
The idea of ​​this exhibition stems from having seen the war live, and not having stopped seeing it from the post-war period to today. From a film by Grigorij Tchoukhrai, recently used in a performance in Los Angeles, I have rethought the theme.
In "A Soldier's Ballad" a soldier gets a license. Abandon the front through the war rear. He encounters suspended life forms, a little untouched nature, the hunger appeased, a few hints of joy, he even finds the greatest love, until he comes within sight of his country.

War shortens the distance between life and death. That escape through disaster was an intense, secretly happy adventure.

The journey was long, the license burned. Hug the mother. It has to start again. Paul writes to Timòteo. “I fought the good fight” like a soldier. And he is ready to die.
Two memories that I linked and dedicated to the artist.

The artist is also a good soldier, (he is not always good, but he has an exercised relationship of conscience). He accuses the world, but he confesses to him all the time. It tends to unmask itself more than to hide itself seriously.

Without realizing it, it composes itself into a habitual difference. In part it makes him proud, in part it afflicts him: the drawbacks of a diversity, the same for which he is accepted, relegates him to a partial function.

Diversity is perceived as an out of the ordinary, even guilty, not a little antisocial. It is.
His in fact involves particular thoughts in such a large number as to become second or even original nature. An origin that appears at the end is a contradiction, but in art this happens.

To varying degrees, diversity belongs to everyone. It is the self, the singularity of the self. In men prone to pathologies, the diversity is even greater.

I have always seen the poet as an uncommon individual, in the sense of his intellectual constitution, therefore of destiny, not in the sense of madness, which is a final block of destiny, its end.

Even when he seems victorious, the poet exudes anxiety. It is too exposed. Majakowsky describes this state of affairs well. It can fall into the abyss even through honors. Marinetti was promoted to academic positions in times of ideological clash between futurism and fascism. He accepted the offer. He spontaneously put his head on the guillotine.

The good soldier becomes bad if he fully believes in the system that honors him.
Also a good soldier is the young man. Whose innocence and foolishness are equated. The young man's body offers more solutions than problems. A boundless reserve of time makes itself felt in his arms, in his temples.

The premonitions of life pulsate in his brain with more heart rhythm than mental.
This young man, who I have certainly been, and have never been because of conscience, resurfaces several times.

I found it in the students of "What is fascism", in "Jewish" (the Jewish girl), in "Dramophone" (in young people who dance to revolutionary songs), in "Students" (in the students of the Academy who draw the drama of young Chinese), in "China ASIA Nuova" (in the execution of young men by the hand of other young men).

I see the young person as a fragile individual, blindly confident in the process of maturation.

Power makes a perpetual use of the young, esteeming him a true customer and a true commodity.

He tells him to clean up, to get himself organized. He has to arm him, and armed leads him to be swept away by something less vulnerable than himself, which is death. It is not a particularly sinister power that imposes this on him. It is the power or the social institution.

It pushes him to rebel, sensing a seriously existing abuse, but which in the same way, (experience is a skilled strategist), responds to something that blocks his path, pilots him.
The impudence of evil or ambiguity is the negative of a command.

This individual, chronologically innocent, has interested me, since I was a child, with perplexity. I looked at my schoolmates as deluded ones of youth, a thorn of which I could not give myself an exact account. I did not feel exempt from it, but participating in that childhood felt an unsafe passage, for which to pass happily but quickly, be aware.
Many of them died in war, of diphtheria, of evils that no longer exist, they have been eliminated from the biographies of the world, in a silly way of the time.

The unconsciousness of the invisibility of power makes young people already different, ever since we were the same age. He could be addressed in a semi-serious tone, pushed, playing, in directions of catastrophe. Education seemed to me a way not to disturb the residual life of the adult. Which is poor, compared to the suitability of the young person. Perhaps it is not entirely true (one pedagogy or the other exists), but in part it is, even now I think so.

If today the world has changed, freedom, and various ideals of an era, have incurred serious misfortunes, often coinciding with their opposite: compulsion, unemployment, infirmity, with a dependence on something not probed. and common, frequently political, in which every feeling of reality is configured. Where is the guato?
How to warn a young person without warning him?

Without intimidating him that is. Nor push it to a neutrality devoid of meaning and cardinal points.

Without confining him to the false idea of ​​an unharmed youth, assisted by nature? Perhaps the only one is to persist, inexhaustible, in the criticism of conscience.
Invite to this mental action.

A lot of strength is needed, the company is defenseless.

Overwhelmers have the talent to perform effective actions by means of radical simplification. A lie that cuts the legs to the complexity of the elements in the field.
It distributes immediate relief, unity of opinion and compulsory slavery.
The good soldier can beware of it. He is armed.

Is this a contradiction? It is, if the contradiction remains the basic choice of
life.

Fabio Mauri
Rome 1998

The good soldier

The soldier is a young armed man. The weapon fires if the soldier has the trigger on his head. In fixed thought there is aim. To hit the mark is to slaughter the idea of ​​man. , and there is self-defense, it must be seriously defended, to be seriously legitimate.
A Great War, it is known, seems to have spread to the world.

The victims that the world of communications shows are either the effects of a montage, or they are real. Life coincides with tragedy. They seem like settling of scores between eras.

Age of colonialism: colonized against colonial empires; massacres between races that are no longer different but equal, vices contracted by ethnic groups that have suffered them; new slavery between former slaves.

Different language has always killed, current events ignite wars between neighboring dialects. It is difficult to distinguish if the world has changed or the same. In what parts it is different, and in what identical to estimated times, with pattern, dark.
It is true that the fundamental themes of life are reflected last.

But the actuality of a century, of this one, is undoubtedly bloody, distorted in the conscience, pressed by a future devoid of distance, devoid of the obligatory boundaries of a form. In the search for events, a world competence, experience, no longer enjoys credit.
Perhaps due to an excessive wide-angle of the gaze, time becomes known only if it is unpublished. Checks the present, which tends to wrinkle. Billions of moments. A few millimeters of light years.

I remembered young artists who died in war, between me and me: French, or Italian, German, Russian, (Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists). They shared international exhibits and hit themselves from national trenches.

This is the world. Nothing can be done about it, is the conclusion. It's not exactly a thought, it's a surrender.

It cannot be the thought of a young man, nor of an artist, nor of a man of religion.
This exhibition aims to be of the world more than the world as it appears to be.
A utopia, I who hate utopias. A reflection on existence and man. My linguistic culture as a tool of experience. A literature, like any art culture.

War is observed in the order of its design, rather than in its harrowing effects. In a paradoxical dress (noble and ferocious), an institutionally enemy humanity, equally armed, is identified.

It is an out of order theme, good for a monument. Historical dust. But actuality, in fact, is invaded by it.

Contemporary eyes stare elsewhere, on abstract projections in the vault of information or veso or one's own mole, if one day he falls ill. Certainly interesting themes, but distracted by the usual catastrophe, which runs over the eyes, at the edges of attention.
Every time I have done something good in art, I have crossed an absurd crossroads, too elementary, almost empty, I know. This is the case. If it's a mistake, it doesn't hurt, or just mine. If it is a truth, I am deeply satisfied with it. The upper floor is secret
The soldier goes on a journey home.

Like the artist, he reviews his stages, wondering why he passed through them. What made him stay longer in one place than in another. To be a painter first of one type, then of another.

The artist's journey, equal to that of a man, through growth, sensitivity, death, his own and that of others, is to a large extent a journey into the answer that his hands have formulated: a journey through the places he has chosen. and they are given to him, that he has understood and hosted him, imagined to meet or that he has seriously inhabited.
He notices it late. His life, so defined, could have been many other lives. Looking around, there are all, a thousand lives regardless of its path, no less lived, sprinkled with good and evil.

There is a psychology of the spirit whose tactile images give body to the invisible of the mind, and certainly like dreams (the comparison is fair), they take on real weight in the psychology of an individual.

The representation makes continuous use of it.

It can also be said that the artist internally travels an exterior, as if the mind were stretched out under his foot like a road.

It amazes me who portrays a horse, least of all if he draws a unicorn.

I say the unicorn to use the extraordinary component of a paradox to the extreme and make my thought more evident, that the world is what we see, but that we equally believe, in a reciprocal semi-visibility, between the world and the self. Invisibility, made world by the artist, is made up of elements that in their substance, furnished with pieces of reality, build an unusual new. Not only does it involve the world of materials, but the entire planetary of meanings, to which I am not sure which senses are the most accredited.

Of course the mind knows what it is, and even feelings orient themselves to it.
It is a widespread sediment, the idea of ​​a world loose in myriads of individuals, an ineluctable ideological vision. A private ontology that characterizes humans, like the tail in dogs.

From this even horizon, similar to a stalemate, it is necessary to re-note the differences and the utilities: the worst and the best, the good and the bad.

Because of pain, life can be anything but pure theory. Just or unjust ideas do not grant safety.

The good soldier, or the artist, makes the point to the mind and the pencil by profession.
the third sign

I have represented the Star of David symbol several times as a sign of an artist. I have assumed this in several works, and it is easy to read.

In a grammatical sense, art is not, but it resembles a religion. And religion is a constant diversity.

I feel this diversity in the man of Jewish confession.

A superiority of history, whose paths I followed, made me consider the Jew different, permeated with a lofty, indeed excessive, destiny.

Dangerous thinking. But I don't want to harm those I love with a good thought.

I warned him so much that I identified, perhaps improperly, the artist with the Jew. I made drawings and works of dual reference, to the destiny of the artist, and to that of the Jew. A young David, or an old Abraham, my father or myself as a young man. Although, I must remember, I am not Jewish.

The first vocation of art is to be able to be what it never was at that moment.
A whole blooms in the corner of a studio. A home birth, outside the clinic.

The (or a) sense, religious belief, of the universe leads me to instruct objects to say what I feel. The infinite objects form the totality of the universe. They indicate what to admire, what to avoid, what to grasp. They deceive, hurt, or comfort.

The dream of objects are other objects.

Two objects juxtaposed, Richard Foreman taught me (I once acted for him), relate to each other by themselves. It is only partially true. Objects affirm something, never a whole speech. One must lead the sense of their persistence in a meaning to a proposition, extended and believed.

Our collection of things is interpretation. More than an idolatry, it is a devotion to the physical models that the universe composes. The identification of the form in which the universe is formed.

I believe, as they believed in ancient times, that facts and objects are the first language, with motionless or dynamic gestures, of God.

Note:
In this paper I have avoided detailed linguistic explanations relating to
what I exhibit.

But the text can be deciphered entirely in this sense.

However, disinterested in raw materials, devoid of man, I had iron painted. The result was a nocturnal landscape of water, with trees and horizons. A photograph made iron. Home and war emerged as antagonistic poles.

As for style, the combination of man's forms is my attitude, not from today. I said it some time ago: painting for me is a collage. Even a watercolor. A collage of subjects and thoughts certainly is. Both share life as matter and the symbolic inclination of the mind.
Thought works only in forms. It is specified for closed forms. Like objects.
I still have to tell myself something

Art is a place where what man believes is expressed, even in a prophetic or preaching way. If the artist is a participant in a confession (Christian, Jewish, Muslim), it is difficult to keep his expression orthodox. Language changes in his hands, introduces things he learns as he composes them. Momentary beauty can drive reason crazy. Never poetry. In its place it is not possible to compose an integral lie.

It is not the man who has changed, perhaps, nor the world.

God has changed. He did not allow himself to be tamed by the notions of the time or by science, and perhaps not even by art, about which he never said a word.
The universe warns that God has always been different. It is abstruse to decipher, without dismay, the language of God's gestures in deeds.

Essentially God is at the cardinal point of the future. I heard it from a Protestant pastor and read it in a Muslim text. I am a Catholic, this way of thinking excites me.
Nature is violent, it kills, it feeds, it has thorns, it offends. Like the man, or the young soldier.

That life is a battle is more a biological fact than a vision of the time.
The tragic events of the world show a biblical God, not so serenely catechetical.
The hypotheses that the physics of the universe emphasizes indicate the difference between this man and the actuality of that God.

Conductor of measurement, the Son of man is the figurativeness of an unthinkable God, beyond any idea of ​​abstraction. But beyond the enigma of tragedy, it is loving.

It is the net underneath for the contemporary man. Confident in a television, esoteric immanentism. The final judgment is excluded. Eternity terrifies, not without reason. Modern man is very tried by his days, even happy ones.

Despite all joy, life is esteemed the only well-deserved hell. Just live it to grab a fee. As if the parts were cast in a distributively painful free play. The final sense is security, probably unfounded, from which the rewards of Being a must derive
the Existing.

I go so far as to instruct objects to say what I see. Because I believe that man thinks in a post-hoc system. Every object and thought is an asteroid stone, before me.
Maybe I don't know what I do anymore: p-I still live with life and its enigmas. It is not a profession. I can't even define it. I thought I was recovering from
thought. In me not methodical, just constant. Like a captive fly coming out of the upturned glass.

Fortunately, I have always lacked the time.