Maxxi series

An observer confronting the photographs of Mario Rossi is cast in an intermedial dimension where architecture, music and painting come together as one. Images overlap and melt into each other to a rhythmic harmony, creating new spaces that spring from reality, but also function as bridges to regions of the mind that the artist discovers and reconstructs, revealing them to the viewer who stops by in enchanted willingness to engage a virtual exploration. Rossi is the Architect who sets order into chaos, who manipulates time and creates special interconnections for him to travel across. The human presence is constant and functional in his work. It is the breath of life which sparks off the dynamic process, accompanying the wandering of the eye. The momentary equilibrium is what Rossi is after - the split second for the artist to capture, in which all forces are in balance: light, colour, geometry are in accord with each other, and all directional motion is momentarily suspended. His snapshots become modules, which are repeated and intersected, giving rise to patterns that support the composition like scaffolding frames, creating full and hollow spaces to inhabit, which develop geometrically and favour dynamic perception. Sleek fragments of faded memories, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit together reassembling the artist's mental vision. Stasis and motion determine the rhythm of Rossi's compositions, as is the case with music. His photographs evoke art history, not simply through the presence of images depicting works of art in their specific contexts, but also and especially through formal reminders of the historical avant-garde movements. The perpendicular and the diagonal lines evoke Mondrian and Van Doesburg's neoplasticist compositions, in their search for perceptive balance and dynamism. A work like 'Punte Rosse al Maxxi' ('Red Spikes at the MAXXI') contains the same explosive power as El Lissitzky's 'Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.' Art is the dimension in which thought flows, opens up new doorways and contaminates. Complex structures multiply and are transformed as if in a kaleidoscope. The photographer's work shares the aim of the scientist who is after the unveiling of the fractal patterns underlying the natural world. Objects endowed with internal homotecy, objects containing different-scale replicas of their own shape reveal perfect order within apparent chaos. The phenomenon of self-similarity allows the artist to create “other” spaces which construct and deconstruct themselves until they attain a purely intellectual dimension. In Rossi's photographic elaborations, the actual spaces housing this process – such as museums or art galleries – are transformed into mental regions for the artist to return to at different junctures of his itinerary. Rossi extrapolates, enlarges, isolates and establishes relations by tapping reality like a painter does his palette. Colour and shape often take over in the perception of viewers, who may at first glance have the impression of confronting abstract art. Sometimes merely guessed at in the midst of modified space the human presence has become increasingly relevant in Rossis's work since 2010, but has never escaped anonymity. Seen from a bird's eye view, individuals seem to lose their humanity and look like ants following the crowd in trails, passing by, pausing, setting off on their way again, like minuscule elements of a collective organism. A sort of dance in unison arises, which follows rhythmic beats and syncronizes motion. One has the impression of inhabiting sheer labyrinths of the mind, where flights of stairs run up and down at the same time, leading into nothing, like they do in Escher's works. Rossi's is a lucid project, a planned journey into the meanders of the mind, through the visual remainders scattered in the psyche.