The recent exhibition of work by Sebastian Di Mauro and Wayne Smith focussed on spiritual and cultural values. Smith's work addressed the loss of spiritual, social and environmental values in contemporary capitalist society. Di Mauro's work ventured into the personally experienced transcendental realm of life, death and after-life, exploring spirituality. His work also hinted at the ritualistic and the primitive, providing a strong counterpoint to his illuminated high-tech X-ray and metal works on the same subject.
Spirituality, impressive strength and cohesiveness were the hallmarks of Di Mauro's work, employing his most elegant use of the grid to date, a subtle and interesting development from his previous manner of using it. With this exhibition an astonishing new maturity has emerged in his focussing and developing of concepts and in his handling of materials.
Two concepts dominate Di Mauro's current work, the confrontation and struggle with the self and with self-acceptance and transcendental and philosophical questions on the possibility of afterlife. Di Mauro's work is essentially a polemic of life versus after-life, seen in the paired canvasses of light and darkness on either side of many works. In the inspiring and fascinating Entrance In/Accessible, 1990, the centre, a mirrored panel of transient reflections, is both the void and a means of forcing the viewer to confront the self, an alarming, living feature in a work of art. The grid-like, burnt-out door frame, also the centre-piece of the triptych, becomes a dramatic structure which, through its treatment of central space and physical and metaphorical void, suggests the transcendental. The burnt out lower half of the door is open and empty, allowing the mind (or body) to pass through freely. This structuring and destructuring