Created for the 15th World Youth Day in 2016, this silkscreen print—produced in a limited edition of 150—is based on a series of drawings commissioned by the Vatican from Mastrovito for the event’s central theme, Mercy. Mastrovito reinterprets this ancient Gospel theme by using a thread as a connecting element between the seven acts of mercy: "The meaning of everything that is humanly shared hangs in the balance on a fine line of stability, upon which—like consummate tightrope walkers of existence—human beings keep the world standing by performing the humble and most essential acts of care, concern, and dedication. If it weren’t for this, the world would come crashing down tomorrow.
The scenes from Sette Opere di Misericordia (Seven Works of Mercy” —a basic catalog of humanity’s fundamental needs—are here preserved in their essence, but each time, beneath the letter of the basic text, the spiritual richness of a truly acute and profound interpretation of the theme emerges. In some cases, this is particularly surprising: a man walks carrying a suffering person on his shoulders, but it is the sick person who shows him the way; one may scatter barbed wire across the land, but the surge of hope will always be unstoppable; clothing certainly means protecting against nakedness, but it is first and foremost the act of knitting that brings life into the world. Even in this case, one gets the impression that the cheerfulness and lightness of Mastrovito’s work— sometimes accused of being facile and frivolous— conceals and at the same time reveals the essence of a humanism that is thought through, meditated upon, and, it seems to me, even modestly lived out in many personal circumstances, certainly removed from the rhetoric of grand values and noble gestures, yet distilled into its deepest essence and its most fundamental meanings. It is this quality of sincerity that sets Andrea Mastrovito’s work— though always full of wit and surprises—apart from the vagaries of pure aesthetic self-indulgence and makes him, at least in my eyes, one of the few contemporary artists capable, with what I would call “theological” precision and with genuine artistic innovation, of reengaging with the themes of the Christian narrative.”
Giuliano Zanchi in “Andrea Mastrovito. Sette Opere di Misericordia”, exhibition catalogue, 2016.