The concept of identity is transforming into the simulation of another identity, a role that forces us to play a part that is not ours but at the same time it becomes us or the possibility to always be different and entirely new to the point of not recognizing the original identity.

Susan Sontag

Reality has become a complex world…

In their daily lives, many choose to take on predefined identities, of others, and in this way, providing a means through which to relate to others.

Sebastiano Mauri explores, through media and other channels, one of the more complex issues of our times: identity. At times he does this through a vision of the social environment and the system of relationships based on itself, and at other times through symbols and images of an alien universe which define his idea through icons of a pre-packaged and “ready to be used” spirituality.

The metamorphosis, albeit declining in different ways and various processes, is at the basis of many of Sebastiano Mauri’s works. Many aspects of his pieces revolve around the human scenario, others around the social scenario, but the cultural horizon is constant in all his works. Sebastiano Mauri is a chorister of images, images which seem embroidered in the subconscious. The fundamental themes of his research appear in chiaroscuro, a precious archive of extraneities and discomfort, of neurosis and alienation, of judgements and prejudices. These are his references.

Sebastiano Mauri represents the extravagance which brings out the singularity, the uniqueness, without fear of judgements. He is the creator of stories which verge between sympathy and tenderness, his stories belong to the multiple and de-centralized post-modern age, and which constitute the core of their times. A personal vision and a collection of “encounters” and “types” which are able to develop observation points on the cultural and social aspects of contemporary lives. The concept of identity is transforming into the simulation of other identities, of a part that forces you to play a different role that eventually becomes your own.

Sebastiano Mauri creates improbable contexts which show unnatural and excessive rules of conduct and aesthetics, and which share with the audience a common existential situation, discovering and revealing a general state of uncertainty.

IMMANENCE, I BELIEVE IN GOD, THE SONG I LOVE TO?, NUMB, FADED, LOVE HAS NO GENDER, six videos on display to view, and for these six videos, for the first time displayed all together, six locations.

The on-scene presence reveals the existence of a series of recognized “roles” which express their mechanical relationship to society, the conflict between the individual and the society becomes more pronounced when the anomaly no longer concerns moral behavior, which deviated from the norm, but when it directly affects the identity.

Sebastiano Mauri uses the video to make his statement: the perspective, the foreground, the editing are the means by which he creates his system of relationships between images and indivisuals and poetry.

He chooses the frame as a point of view, an observations point that transcends the closed system which encompasses all that is resent in the image. The captivating and alien light and shade dynamics produce blurred and fuzzy visions, in which the image becomes comprehensible as well as visible.

Sebastiano Mauri believes there are images that have an “affective” relationship with the objects they represent, a true and present reality with no symbolic manipulation or recasting of the same, and it appears he wants to explicate the image from its spatial-temporal coordinates to transform it into an icon, a pure expression of affection that does not exist separately from that which it expresses. The affection seems to be able to express the possible without making it happen, and at the same time expresses something unique, within a story which becomes the expression of the times or of a place. An iridescent reflection for the transformation as a profound change: a fatal transition between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the known and the unknown, between the living and representations.

Francesca Alfano Miglietti