Andrea Mastrovito, SETTE GIORNI

Room 21

The work I will present at Giorni Felici is an immediate reference to the title of the exhibition. On entering the house, I felt a familiar sensation. “Familiar” both in the Freudian sense of opposite and, at the same time, synonymous with “disturbing” (heimlich, or “familiar” in German, has a second, more literal meaning, namely “kept at home, hidden”), and in its more common meaning, of something already known to you, experienced, as of a past, recent and perhaps, precisely, serene, “happy”. The contrast between these two sensations, similar and opposite, led me to conceive this work, Sette Giorni (Seven Days). “Seven Days” is a week, the emblem of the cycle of life and nature that begins and ends and begins again uninterruptedly, rising from its own ashes each time. “Seven Days” is also the phrase that Samara Morgan, in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, whispers over the phone, foretelling the end by her hand. There, too, it is a question of a cycle, of a ‘ring’. And so these seven black collages were born. Black pictures that wrap the room, each one bearing the name of one of the days of the week, and where memories, the serene faces of the past and present, carved into the white of the underlying paper, let themselves be enveloped and caressed by the black of the future and of oblivion.
Andrea Mastrovito

A search for wonder, in reality a restless antenna on the world and our cultural baggage, diluted according to fragile methods and materials devoted to perceptive amazement. Sensitivity towards the contingent, the paper datum and light as ineffable instruments to highlight a practice that is always conceptual: the application of coloured fragments, the painstaking skill of assembling fragments that reveal themselves to be parts of a whole in the overall compositional plan, in which every detail deontologically and physically reconstructs a new reality, imaginative but no less true. The artist crosses the threshold of the two-dimensional datum, using it. The result is pictorial but for suggestion and certainly not for the use of canvas and brush: there is interest in the procedural part, in the activation of a form and the construction of the same according to a simple but not easy logic, childish in the joyful and bricoleur reference. Homo Ludens as a possible propaedeutic answer to our existential fractures? Mastrovito’s perspective is a bird’s-eye view, in perpetual motion between extreme craftsmanship and the actualization of urgent problems, always conducted in a gentle manner. As Derrida, a philosopher who is close to the requests observed so far, states: “A space that can give rise to truth in painting remains to be carved out. Neither internal nor external, this space widens without ever allowing itself to be framed, but it is never out of frame. […] The line attracts and withdraws from itself, it attracts and dispenses with it, from itself. It situates itself.
Andrea Bruciati

Andrea Mastrovito was born in Bergamo in 1978. He now lives between Bergamo and New York. He first exhibited in 2003 at The Flath in Milan. He had three solo exhibitions at Analix Forever in Geneva in 2005, 2007 and 2009. In 2006 and 2008 he exhibited at the 1000eventi Gallery and Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea in Milan, in 2007 at the Palais des Expositions in Brussels, in 2008 at the Jerome Ladiray Gallery in Roue, at the Dior Centre in Paris and at the Italian Academy of Columbia University. The Foley Gallery in New York hosted Black Bag – American Philosophy of Composition in 2008 and Love is a four-letter word in 2009. In the same year he held the exhibitions Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino at Assab One – Ex GEA in Milan, La Bonne Nouvelle at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Lacoux, and Climat Poetique at the Hotel de Ville in Geneva. He participated in the II Prague Biennale in 2005 and the 15th Rome Quadrennial in 2008. In 2005 he exhibited in the exhibition Beauty is not difficult at the Fondazione Stelline in Milan and then moved to Berlin. In 2009 he held Italian Artists New York at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and, in the same space, in 2010 he created the installation Speed of a car + flowers. On 5 June 2010 he set up The Island of Dr. Mastrovito in a room at Governor’s Island in New York.