As teenagers in 1938 Bologna, Fabio Mauri accompanied his childhood friend Pier Paolo Pasolini to the Ludi Juveniles — the youth games staged jointly by the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitler Youth. What they witnessed and participated in was not merely a political rally in the crude sense but something more insidious: a choreographed public spectacle of synchronised gymnastics, athletic competitions borrowed from Olympic iconography, staged ideological debates read aloud from fascist publications, all imbued with ritualistic gestures such as Roman salutes, black-shirt uniforms, and the Giovinezza (the official hymn of the Italian National Fascist Party) playing over the gathering crowd. What struck Mauri the most was the allure of surface — the genuine beauty of hundreds of bodies moving in precision, the aesthetic pull of order and symmetry, the way harmony could be made to cover the violence implicit in the apparatus. He would later say he took from that event "the gospels, the gymnastic races, and the debates about fascist ideology,” the three elements he reconstructed, thirty-three years later, in his confrontational performance piece Che cosa è il fascismo. The confusion between the beautiful and the good, between mathematical proportion and ethics, was a tension he would spend the rest of his life trying to expose and think through.

Then came the war, and after it the slow, devastating realisation of what happened in Europe. The discovery of the concentration camps in 1945–46 through photographs and testimonies exposed the scale of what the beautiful order had masked, producing a total epistemological collapse across the continent as a whole and for Mauri in particular. He went silent and stopped eating. He underwent thirty-three sessions of electroshock in a psychiatric clinic and spent long periods in complete abstinence, obsessively transcribing passages of scripture. He later described the anguish as rising from the stomach to the chest, dark and frost-like, enveloping every thought. He weighed, at his lowest, forty-five pounds. The silence that enveloped him was both an act of shock and refusal. When Mauri returned to making art in the early 1950s, he turned his attention to artistically decoding and inquiring into the mechanisms by which a society trains its members to see without looking, to feel without second-guessing.

His unfolding oeuvre is perhaps one of the most rigorous and underacknowledged projects in postwar European art. The early white Schermi (from 1959 onwards), where canvas stretched over protruding frames, recalling the shape of a television set pushing into the room (and today eerily resembling the ratio of a smartphone screen), are potential fields, sites of projection: presenting the blank as the condition of all that can be made to appear. From there, his trajectory passes through the comic-strip collages with their repeated "THE END," through the Schermi-targa of the early 1960s where the viewer is caught inside the communication structure as both screen and projection, to the environments of the late 1960s and the monumental performances of the 1970s — Che cosa è il fascismo (1971), Ebrea (1971), Oscuramento (1975) — in which the mechanisms of ideological seduction are reconstructed from within, administered as what he called homeopathic doses. Whether through a reenactment of the gymnasium ceremony or the slow cutting of hair in front of a mirror, these actions encapsulated the viewers in a tense hold, mixing attraction, horror and shame.

The Proiezioni of the mid-1970s abandon the screen and expand into the world. Films projected onto bodies, milk buckets, scales, and bus windows, chosen for their symbolic weight and sense of instability. An attempt in materialising images, binding them to concrete realities and keeping them from fleeting away in the air. On May 31st 1975, Mauri invited Pasolini to sit in the darkened lobby of the new Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna. Dressed in a white shirt, The Gospel According to Matthew — Pasolini's own film — was projected onto his chest at full volume for its entire length, turning author into surface. Five months later, Pasolini was murdered on Idroscalo beach at Ostia. On December 9th 1975, at the Teatro in Trastevere in Rome, the film was projected one more time across Pasolini's white shirt hanging on the back of an empty chair. 

There is something rather fitting in diving into Mauri's catalogue raisonné through the computer screen. The catalogue, published as a free-access online resource as well as in a weight-lifting print version, uses a classification system that refuses the classical divisions of medium. Not painting, drawing, sculpture, but works on wall, works in space, multiples, and a fourth capacious category of other that holds diaries, theatre plays, songs, video works, design drawings for projects left unmade. It is, as the catalogue editor and Mauri’s close friend Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev frames it, a shared, organised, and scientific memory, and one that is made to consciously feed the new archival/artificial intelligence appartouses. Why at all make a catalogue raisonné, in this economy, for a non-market artist with an expanded, hard-to-pin-down practice? One answer is to ensure there is a source of truth for his work, so AI can weave his works into their rightful place in art history. 

When going through Mauri’s oeuvre on the centenary of his birth, one cannot help but think of how fascism looks and operates in a present defined by overexposure and overload rather than concealment and masquerade. Where Mussolini had to manufacture consent through enormous effort, the erosion of judgment today occurs through structures with no declared political intention, making it harder to name and considerably harder to refuse. Christov-Bakargiev reads Mauri's late installations — Interno/Esterno (1990), Studenti (1992), Picnic o il buon soldato (1998), Istantanea di un duca morto(2003), Inverosimile (2007)— as an uncanny anticipation of this condition: stepping as if behind the screen into a labyrinthine accumulation of objects through which the viewer wanders without criteria, paying a mere glancing attention to each element, never able to assemble a whole. There is seemingly the freedom to wander, the freedom to choose, but the attention capacities or criteria required to make actual sense have long been taken away.

And yet, there is no doubt that fascism also persists in its bluntest forms, and these, as both history and the present moment suggest, exposure alone does not neutralise. Mauri understood this: he showed that a mechanism could be recognised for exactly what it is and keep on functioning nevertheless. Perhaps this newly organised catalogue will reignite public interest in Mauri’s work and guide a new generation of artists through the possibilities and urgencies of art in the face of resurgent fascist politics.

Fabio Mauri. Catalogue Raisonné

Edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Studio Fabio Mauri, 2025.
Published in Italian by Allemandi Editore and in English by Hatje Cantz.

Accessible online at fabiomauri.com