Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument… The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1988.
The persistence of memory has long been an underlying theme in the work of Sebastian Di Mauro. Through painting, sculpture and installation Di Mauro has explored the significance of personal memory, and to this end his work often has the quality of autobiography. In the late 1990s Di Mauro has returned to the place of his childhood, both literally and metaphorically to create art that strikes a chord, visually and emotionally. His visual language is at once familiar and strange, and it is on this axis that the work turns.
Amongst other things, Di Mauro cites the Italian Arte Povera movement as having had an influence on his practice, but not solely by virtue of its Italianness. Arte Povera as a movement emerged in the 1960s around a group of Italian artists who regularly showed together. As a collective of sorts, their work reflected an international interest in some of the more prevailing artistic dialogues surrounding late 1960s contemporary art practice: land art, the antiform, postminimalism and conceptual art. Translated, Arte Povera means literally 'poor art' but the term was not meant to describe an interest in poor materials (despite the fact that many of the artists involved did use found or natural materials). Rather, the term was coined by Italian critic Germano Celant in 1967 to describe the humbleness of the work that characterized the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline