"The four rooms beyond the walkway are given over to the unveiling of the processes which led to the creation of I Am Not Legend screened on the first floor. The creation of an animated film calls for the manual processing of every single frame, in this case extracted from the original film, selected, printed and filtered by a number of pictorial interventions linked to the necessities of meaning that the artist decided to impress upon the plot, along with the systematic blotting out of the zombies with white acrylic paint. A little taste of the images used for the film, one hundred and eighty-five of them out of one hundred thousand, are featured in the show, complete with normal picture frames, giving rise to an orderly and choral concert, one capable of narrating the process and skilfully summing up the narrative development of the film. But it is thanks to the latest work produced by the artist, presented in the final room, that the circle comes to a close. In ordine di apparizione is a modern polyptych in four identical picture frames which each feature twenty-five graphite drawings. Completed by the artist only a few days prior to the opening, after two months of tireless toil, the work is a sort of posthumous homage to the film, or rather, it’s the final unveiling of the sources that Mastrovito drew on in order to put together its dialogues and weave its narrative fabric. The artist redesigned the front covers of a hundred publications, including albums, books and films, in which it is not hard to retrace the predilections of a boy who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, with the idea of “drawing on all the registers, from comedy to tragedy, without snobbism: we start out from If This is a Man by Primo Levi, via Shakespeare’s Hamlet or George Orwell’s 1984, through to the songs of Metallica, The Doors and REM, or generation-defining films such as The Never-Ending Story, Platoon, Terminator, Blade Runner and Matrix. Mastrovito’s favourite means of knowledge and reappropriation returns – drawing – as does his pausing on the verge of the undefinable. That white which stops us from seeing the main figure on the front of every magazine cover is obtained by halting the pencil, drawing no further on the cover, giving rise to a modern non-finite, of which the artist, for now, remains on the threshold."
Davide dall'Ombra in "I Am Not Legend" Exhibition catalogue, pp. 190-191.