Curated by Deborah Rossetto

Inauguration Saturday 18th January at 6.00 pm

The exhibition can be visited from January 18 to March 14, 2014

At the end of the 1950s, Pasolini foreshadowed, with intense pain, a future, not so distant, in which the value of diversity would be definitively lost in favour of an identity homologation, undoubtedly less frightening but profoundly inauthentic. In this sense, homologation would have triggered a mechanism by which, if not hidden, the differences would have emerged in an increasingly negative sense, aggravating an already historically compromised figure: the Other.
Sebastiano Mauri and the Other. The Other is understood not only as a minority - recognized as weak in a given historical period and in a given society - but also understood as the result of intimate and individual conceptions. On the other hand, there are minorities of all sorts, invisible, not necessarily socially persecuted or historically denounced but simply others, which are constituted as such due to arbitrary judgments and prejudices.

To demonstrate how the mechanisms of discrimination are inherent in all of us, often metabolized and therefore unaware, Mauri subjects the viewer to a test that is not at all indulgent. The exhibition itinerary begins with the user with Immanence: a video work.

Starting from the conception of Buddhist immanence according to which a soul can coexist for a certain period of time in two distinct bodies, the artist guides us in the complex and intimate confrontation with his own psychological limits, bringing to light the most hidden prejudices that inhabit our conscience. From the very first floors of people spied on during their daily lives, Mauri's work leads to the formation of contextual hypotheses on the basis of personal beliefs without any objective knowledge of reality such as to almost always misleading. Only when the foreground is extended do we become aware of the facts. Isn't it perhaps like this, through simple metabolized automatisms, that all sorts of discriminations are established? On the other hand, reality becomes aware of itself when it is represented and the viewer of Immanence is induced to reflect on the ease and therefore the danger of the conception of the Other.

The urgency of the message is particularly evident in the series of paintings Shadow of Doubt, and Label Series where Mauri insists on the malicious and arbitrary side of the perception of diversity, while working on the portrait. The first is video projections of
fading faces that find fulfilment in the canvases where the artist has painted somatic features deprived of their natural context with photographic precision: only eyes, nose and mouth. A rapid succession of faces of all origins and shapes, almost a long metamorphosis where one retains something of the other while revealing its own diversity.

In Label Series, Mauri works on the relativism of social interaction by portraying the bipolar side of identity and putting opposite labels to it. If each individual is made up of dissimilar identities, among the most contradictory and mobile, the decisive factor will be our decision on which aspect to elevate in the evaluation of the other.

That's not all. The paradox of religion that often self-determines itself in the need to monopolize the faith through the hegemony of a creed is, for Mauri, a pretext for drawing the contradictions of rejection of the other. In the Gods versus Aliens series, small multicolour pop landscapes composed of sequins, lights, sparkling flowers and beads, are enclosed in glass bells that give a mystical breath to these scenarios suspended between kitsch and asceticism. And it is here that religion comes to terms with itself by establishing an unexpected relationship with the other par excellence: the alien. An example, among others, is the unexpected encounter between a monstrous and massive creature with a mechanical profile and a god: it is Buddha, superbly seated on a placid turf with an air consciously burdened by the responsibility of collective devotion, a responsibility that only a god can argue. The alien, perhaps enlightened by sudden and visceral faith, establishes physical contact with the Buddha and, settling into a guard position, seems determined to protect him from possible unhappy events. Legends and divinities are here an ironic pretext to talk about the Other and measure oneself with the irreducible historical questions of man. Reminding us that the two figures originate from the same sentiments - one became a creed, the other a legend - Mauri constructs scenarios free from any prejudice where a dogmatic and loyal god accepts among the faithful the other par excellence, the absolute stranger, the one whose origin and follower do not know, perhaps recognizing himself in this.

In a mix of living cults, extinct cults, anonymous aliens but also known monsters, men of every culture and origin, tired faces, lively faces, compromised traditional iconographies, and mobile identities, Mauri establishes relationships on the border between the sacred and the profane where the Other has no sense of existing since everything is other.

With the solo show The Other, Sebastiano Mauri reveals unconscious mechanisms of social coexistence, bringing to light the conflicts of diversity and his work is punctual and effective, where, to put it to Brecht's words, the arts prove useful to art par excellence: life.

The Aliens series is a reflection on the relativity of points of view in a world increasingly plagued by ideologies that reinforce a foreign vision of the other, making them so different from us that they seem "alien". The Islamic belief is seen as a danger to the Christian one, non-EU citizens as thieves of opportunity, and the spectre of the homosexual family that threatens the traditional family. Just reverse the point of view, and even a real extraterrestrial can seem more like us, more "human", than many people around us.