Drifts and docks

Travels in the matter lightness

There are concepts such as flexibility, modularity, plasticity which in time closest to us have been used to define the contemporary society and in particular culture and identity designed now no longer as the result of a cumulative process but rather as a combination of different fragments that could be combined, replaced or abandoned. Contemporary culture is thus a continue discovery and rediscovery. But this freedom has many tensions and heightens a general sense of insecurity, displacement and uprooting with precarious and unstable equilibrium often subject to sudden and unpredictable changes.

Spanish writer Josè Saramago wrote: “when the traveler sat in the sand of the beach and declared “there is nothing more to see”, he knew it was not true. You have to see what you have missed the first time, see again what you already saw, see in the springtime what you saw in the summer, in the daylight what you saw at night, see the sun shining where you saw the rain falling. You have to go back to the footsteps already taken, to go over again or add fresh ones alongside them. You have to start the journey anew. Always”. Mauro Pipani is a traveler. An inner world traveler who with strength and lightness creates images that convey memories, memories, narratives. A poetic feeling that tells the world through some of its traces stratified in a contamination of signs, images, words or silences. A collapse of time and space. A set of fragments, remains, tracks. A minimalist sign that speaks of indeterminacy, fade, lyricism, sacredness, lightness and melancholy. A poetry looking for a fixed point in a changing world. A poetry asking and requiring awareness, reflection, introspection. It takes time to go beyond the everyday superficiality with which we observe the world and that allows us to discover that the black and white colors are not absolute but have infinite shades.

Internationally other artists have developed research paths different from Pipani reaching results in a similar field. For example, the paintings created by American artist Sterling Ruby although influenced by sociological implications linked to power struggles, vandalism, and social demarcations lose their original meaning acquiring an organized, structured, and minimalist force bringing us into a meditative dimension. Or, if we think about the photographic field British artist Idris Khan artworks are good examples in which the creative act is included in an elegant dimension of reflection. Mental archaeologies as in the artworks created by Doris Salcedo that despite having a political and social background are open to introspective and cathartic trips.

Mauro Pipani makes matter light. He knows how to cleanse it, cleansing it of any superficiality. He knows how to give shape to the breath of our steps, the silence of our consciences, the strength of our memories. Traces of contemporaneity. Traces of a perfect order. Traces of sense in times of crisis.

"The door, the limen, the way: through them it begins the journey often real - sometimes imaginary - touching landscapes, borders, routes, visible and invisible destinations. Towards the other the elsewhere, a beyond space. And at the end of the trip always find ourselves, or fragments of ourselves."

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