"“We have found the gold!” exclaimed Andrea Mastrovito at precisely two o’clock in the morn ing at the end of his first day of work, inaugurating fifteen days of work before the opening of the exhibition Pindemonte. The artist conjugated the verb “to find” in the first person plural since he had directed a team of about ten students to carry out this performance. Together, they had executed, with cutter and chisel, a real archaeological mission to find the layers buried under the white paint of the gallery walls. Thus, the luminous blue-green of a work by Julian Opie conceived in the same place ten years earlier and the silver-gray of a painting by Jessica Diamond was brought to light. As for the recovered gold, Andrea Mastrovito applied it himself in 2005. On the adjacent wall, the burgundy revived the memory of a Matt Collishaw painting, and the black, perhaps a dark wood by Alex Cecchetti. The colorful bouquet of murals thought to be gone forever was thus suddenly brought back to the gallery’s current state. If restoring the historical layers of an exhibition space is already a concept in and of itself, it only becomes more potent when transmuted into a cleverly elaborated composition. As a demiurge, Andrea Mastrovito has exploited the entire surface of the walls to orchestrate a contemporary dance of death on a white background. As a support to the imagination, the latter offered the spectator a screen of projection for this universe which did not omit chil dren, women, or animals and which reminds us how much of a social being man is, unable to do without exchanges and communication. Falling from the sky, the staged characters took to the gallery as a backdrop: for example, a pipe coming out of the ceiling served as a springboard for this choreography, and, at the end of the race, the floor presented the splinters of the wall of those who returned to the earth. Thus, as logic would have it, the floor was already eating up the feet of an older man, and a young mother caught too soon in the shadow tries to hold on to life by clinging to her child. From the brilliance of life to the inevitable end that awaits us, human figures of all genera tions were engraved in the walls of the gallery: they jumped, danced, fell, loved each other, walked along the path of life with a bird’s eye view or from a low angle, in a ratio of scale iden tical to that of the visitor. The contemporaneity of Mastrovito’s work could be read not only in the choice of his characters, representative of our current world but also in the ephemeral character of his presentation, which did not exceed the duration of the exhibition. A way to perhaps insist on the vanity of our existence. Similarly, all the scenes took place under the meditative glance of their author, who had represented himself vis-à-vis the principal com position engraved into the wall on the other side of the room, for the condition of an artist is by no means free of fatality.
As a man of his generation, Mastrovito was facing a theme that punctuates the history of Western art and whose subject is familiar to him since, close to his hometown of Bergamo, in the city of Clusone, there is one of Italy’s most famous frescos representing the Dance Macabre.
In contrast to the elaborate paintings created in previous centuries based on preparatory drawings, here, the underlying paintings provide the basis for the drawings Mastrovito en graved on the wall: the remains of mural paintings resurface in the present. The same level of depth was therefore deliberately reached, for example, to reveal the red common to the cap of a character and to the hair of another. Going deeper or shallower into the cutting of the un derpainting means giving a certain tone to the composition. A work of archaeology that man ifests itself both in the updating of past times and in the technical dexterity mobilized when it comes to meticulously scratching a few square centimeters, millimeter by millimeter.
The artist had only the gallery walls and their history as material, and he was doing nothing more than bringing forgotten realities back to life from this macabre dance."
Karine Tissot in "To Draw is To Know", pp 20-21