Ave Maria – Pan | Palazzo Arti Napoli

Salvatore Mauro : Mauro's site-specific work was inspired by the canto of Paradise which deals with Dante and Beatrice's encounter with God. "Of course, describing God for an artist is not easy and sometimes one falls into banality - he explains - In the end I was inspired by a banknote stamped by an anonymous person that I had found some time ago, and on which there was a very mystical phrase about God, an expression that I then transferred onto the lightbox with water”. The installation by Salvatore Mauro entitled "Ave Maria" is, in fact, formed by two boxes inside which, immersed in gushing liquid, there is a digital photo of an Eva-Maria holding out a first apple suspended in the air , and in the other a sentence. A construction of objects that sees in front of the pits a large wrought iron kneeler and on the left an old record player with the Ave Maria sung by Callas. The idea of ​​using the phrase is linked to the fact that "God cannot be sought, but he finds you - explains the artist - and perhaps he does so with a banal means such as money which is most often seen as an instrument of the devil. The idea was also to bring an anonymous person into a museum, an ordinary person who, in my opinion, had involuntarily created a work, and had the opportunity to show his message. For this reason, before the exhibition, I made a stamp with the same characters and errors of the original banknote with which I cloned other ten euro banknotes. It represents a sort of diffusion of the original message, some I signed some not. And many have been spent again, put back into the commercial circuit. A choice that depends on the importance given to the banknote: whether it was decided to keep it as a work or to use it as simple money. The original banknote was then exhibited at the Pan in a small pleixglass case as if to highlight its importance, then I replaced it with its twin fake photocopy, and put it back into circulation. To return the work to where it started from, among ordinary people and not leave it in a museum. I think that with this operation the money has lost its real power because now that banknote has acquired a higher value than its currency. Who knows who will be the lucky one to find it and recognize its artistic importance, also because the series of the other ten euros reproduced was numbered from the original banknote"


Interactive and performative installation - iron, vinyl, light, water, banknote, wood, sound