TRI ENG

TRIALOGO PROJECT

Curated by E. Sassi

Following, I believe, several councils in the days to come. The first and most enthusiastic, I remember, was Mauro Maugliani: «I hate painting», he told me at a certain point, peremptory. Then he explained: "For me to start painting is the final and less interesting part of my work. My work begins much earlier, and it is all or almost in the thought of the work, in the emotions that precede, in the project, in the encounter with the subject that lights up my imagination, my imagination ".

I was sure that somehow he was telling the truth despite the even amazing, muscular skill of his being a painter could make those declarations paradoxical, even absurd. Painting for him came later, at the end of a journey, a means even detestable. I also knew the fascination, the aesthetic attraction of Mauro for eccentric subjects, physically borderline, beings beyond a "limit", beyond or on this side, beings on the ridge of classical aesthetic canons. And I appreciated his ability to trace the beauty where the manuals would always banish it (in his studio one morning I had the opportunity to admire a recent series of his paintings on the theme of old age, full nude of women and men of old age , with the physical signs of time well evident and not lyrically transfigured).

I was therefore quite sure that Mauro would accept when I proposed to him, for his three works, a rather unusual theme / subject not to say crazy, at least for the contemporary aesthetics (from Philippe de Champaigne to Velázquez, many in fact the authors of the past to having dealt with it): «I believe - I told him - that you should take care of nuns, I see a theme suited to your nature as an artist, the nuns are mysterious beings, almost nobody talks about them, nobody investigates their lives, they are a little bit suspended between a real, concrete life and a vow to god and prayer. Yet the nuns love, suffer, live, die ... ».

They wanted to be just suggestions thrown in there, but great was the surprise when I learned that, even before proposing that theme, the sensitive antennas of Mauro man (rather: child) and Mauro artist had already, for a long time, intercepted the topic . Mauro told me in fact that as a child, seven eight years old, he was fascinated by certain nuns' tombs, buried all together in a cemetery where he often went with his grandmother, who held him by the hand. He spoke to me of the fascination that the black and white faces of those veiled beings, portrayed on the headstones in old semi-faded photographs, were exerting on him.

He also told me that he remembered exactly that place, where he was, and at that point I knew that somehow his work for the exhibition, or at least one of his works, would start from there, from that cemetery-epiphany, from those feelings lost in a distant time all his own. I knew that Mauro would have mixed in his childhood memories the theme "Sisters" and the sub-theme, equally congenial as well as classic, of the Imago Mortis, in an artistic reworking that would later reveal pop and consciously kitsch (the sacred and the saint, as for apparatuses, often are).

This is how the extrapainting works of great intensity were born, created by Maugliani with heterogeneous materials and means: a hand masterfully carved in plaster, for example, part of the under glass work entitled Sweet Sweet Crux, a work conceived as an ideal extension of the big picture In God We Trust, two meters by two meters oil that dominates the setting. Here the painter portrays in his own way, or masterfully, a female face with long hair, without veil, in a strictly male cassock: is she a woman but would like to be a man? Is she a nun but in a priest's dress? Is she a nun-nun of some future - who knows where who knows when - in the exercise of a ritual function that today is denied her?

Again the recurring theme in the art of Maugliani of the double, of the ambiguous identity that hides beyond its hyper-realism, which precisely because hyper is also, often, surrealism, of the type that gives shape to some formless.

The plaster hand is to be considered as an expressive whole with the enormous canvas. A hand severed, meticulously sculpted to the most millimeter of the veins, a hand without a patina of protection, which therefore soon, by the precise will of the author, will suffer as a "living" art work organic microtransformations generating molds.

Must be observe the details of the different works of Maugliani: the gold damask, the cross and the rosary interwoven with the fingers in chalk, real micro-sculptures in sugar paste (sweet indeed, sweets for existences that perhaps were not), the ultraviolet of the photodigital on Plexiglas (plastic processing of faces of anonymous nuns drawn from collective burials) or the white-lacquered wood with which the artist has repainted an old kneeler that has become an integral part of his video installation The Sixth Hour, a kind of confessional claustrophobic wrapped in brocade cardinalice, in which the visitor is obliged to kneel if he wants to follow the video projected in loop on a wall-mounted Ipad.

Certainly wanted the contrast between the scarlet monogram "I love JC" (Jesus Christ) imprinted on the kneeling, which refers to the merchandising of the monogram I love NY, and the content of the video The Sixt Hour, a title borrowed from the gentle song, a Rosary of the Sixth Hour, which is listened to in headphones, a cappella singing of a nun that Maugliani, to say of the correspondence of his sensitivity to the theme that I had proposed, had recorded months before the exhibition and its contents were even hypothesized. A song that in the sound of a deliberately shaky video, deliberately blurred, deliberately in black and white, deliberately played on a light / dark dialectic, alternates or overlaps with repeated Buddhist mantras (syncretism therefore: still something double, complex, aesthetically ambiguous).