"Andrea Mastrovito (Bergamo 1978, lives and works in NY) is the artist invited by Contemporary Locus to create a piece for the Hotel Cappello d’Oro. The commission Polvere di stelle, is an installation that climbs up the walls of the courtyard. The Hotel becomes the commissioner and interpreter of a site-specific work in a space that opens its door to the community in a vital spot of the city. The conception and making of the piece, just like an inter-generational amarcord, has generated moments of sharing and encounters that have allowed for images and memories of the place to resurface. [...]
The project Polvere di Stelle transformed over a few months, influenced by the artist’s other ongoing projects: initially conceived as an icon on a golden background, centred around a figure with ‘craniometro e cilindro’, the piece turned out to be the portrait of a couple (Anna and Ernesto Zambonelli), captured from afar while looking out to the horizon. And if the stories of our lives are mixed with those of businesses and their activities, with this portrait Mastrovito has offered his free interpretations of a new way of measuring form, memory and transformation.
Designed, carved and set directly into the walls of the courtyard, whose dust is precisely the ‘Star dust (polvere di stelle) that gives the title to the work, the portrait of the couple is freed from any ambition of resemblance. While the heads become polyhedrons, the entire composition is based on a cartesian plan built through the addition of hundreds of rulers that extend the surface of the main tower of the courtyard. The theme of the measurement of our time, that nowadays includes the index of digital communication, in the artist’s most recent works takes the form of an iconic and symbolic obsession for rulers. They are objects used in daily activities, that await in our drawers, elements of certainty for ‘measuring things’ that become in the artist’s work instruments for measuring a reality that seems to find it impossible to distinguish what is true from false. They are a simple and real symbols of a human necessity for analysing and assessing the truth of things. Thus almost paradoxically and with no expression of a direct judgement, Mastrovito represents our condition of ‘globally and virtually informed individuals’, inserting into these Cartesian axes – constructed as an accumulation of rulers – images, memories, situations, dreams and scenes of real life. These are news and information that flow into a stream captured and offered by the artist who leaves it to the viewer to analyse. In the case of the portrait of Anna and Ernesto, the Cartesian axe welcomes two figures, united by love and work and a specific place, whose resemblance and perceptions changes for each one of us. Their heads, transformed in volumes in the shape of a star, are a reference to the international system of hotel quality assessment, but also to the individuality and plurality of the stars in a night sky. The Cartesian axe equally evokes the vertical expansion of the piece, following the architecture of the courtyard and expanding its content and shapes."
From contemporarylocus.it