OP ENG

ORDINARY PEOPLE

Curated by Giorgia Calo

Mauro Maugliani's portraits are neither Pop, nor even praise, much less the celebration of culture and mass society, they don’t represent proud faces of their 15 minutes of glory, which we have been accustomed to seeing in Andy Warhol’s portraits, interested in turning the character into an icon.

Maugliani's portraits are populist, they speak of a society, the contemporary one, crushed by the time which advances of preponderant way and which manages to cannibalize anything: emotions, values, and ethics. A society of spectacle prophesized by Guy Debord in the sixties, where the French situationist anticipated the imminent transformation of the person because of the economic, social and political system aided by modern capitalism.

The characters staged by Maugliani express their experiences, tell their personal story through their looks and expressions. Indeed, the skill of the artist lies in his ability to talk about people on the street, a priori anonymous, but which constitute the fabric of our society. They are ordinary people, without any social or cultural reference, lost in a perpetual sense of precariousness. It could be prostitutes, models, tramps, employees ... no visual indication of their origin. And yet all these portraits reveal a common sense of melancholy, a feeling of loneliness.

At a time when individualism is at the center of society, the void created around humans becomes the absolute evil of modern life.

Maugliani's work can be summed up in his own words: "My work describes through portraiture and anatomy, sudden alienation, the loss of the individual in everyday life, emptied of his social function."

The people painted and portrayed by Maugliani are therefore ordinary people, common, that we are used to cross every day on the street, the tram or the subway. It's about who we usually do not pay attention to, or even a glance, because they are themselves alienated by the muted music transmitted by the headphones of their Iphone or by reading their favorite daily, pretending to worry about what is happening around them, too busy in their daily rituals, made of mechanical gestures made with sufficiency.

Then suddenly, we realize that these people are in fact us: the "I is Somebody Else", Somebody else is none other than me.

In this loss of individuality, all the theme of loneliness is concentrate.

It is not a coincidence if some of his portraits are literally immersed in the blue, a kind of amniotic fluid, coded as an intense blue, whether through oil painting (the pictorial technique par excellence) or Bic pen (unconventional technique recently adopted by many artists), the result is extraordinary! The layers that make up the image simulate the epidermis of the skin, highlighting all the imperfections of these faces any, insisting carefully on wrinkles, folds, eyebrows and lips, by transfiguring them like information elements on the complexity of the human personality.

The deepening of certain aspects of the face leads to the emergence, in addition to appearance, of these imperceptible layers made of moods, tensions and suspensions which differ according to the subject depicted. The intention is to represent the human being for what he is and not for what he seeks to show, diminished by any embellishment or clue that could influence us in the perception of what we see.

Maugliani's compositional skill goes hand-in-hand with a surprisingly expressive maturity, inspired by everyday life that is nothing but the essence of art