This essay is included in the catalog Andrea Mastrovito: To Draw is to Know, published by Magonza and Wilde Gallery.
“My name is Robert Neville. I am a survivor living in New York City … If there’s anybody out there — anybody — please. You are not alone,” Will Smith, playing a military virologist, pleads to an emptied Manhattan in the post-apocalyptic film I Am Legend. The 2007 movie is an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel. However, the dystopia that both the movie and the novel illustrate is nothing if not futuristic. One can imagine in great detail the same city in the spring of 2020 when the early waves of COVID cleared the streets and struck fear in mundane sidewalk interactions that brought quarantine to the otherwise theater that plays out in the streets of dense urban life.
Around the same time, several regions of northern Italy had suffered the same tragic fate as the parallel New York Cities: a rogue virus burning through vulnerable populations before spreading en masse, decimating community support networks and the institutions that were supposed to protect them. As early as February 2020, several municipalities in northern Italy were in a state of emergency, and the Italian army was deployed to the city of Bergamo in Lombardy — Andrea Mastrovito’s hometown — to transport the bodies of hundreds of victims. The city was ground zero for the virus in Europe.
The German expressionist horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), intact today from the few prints that survived an order to destroy every copy due to copyright infringement of the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, has the mysterious Count Orlok drinking the blood of his neighbors under the guise of an unidentified plague. We know that his reign of terror is over when we see the castle in the Carpathian Mountains destroyed. The film echoes the fears of “the Other” — here, reflecting the wave of anti-Semitism in Germany at the time of its making — as a scapegoat for whatever plague or hardship comes their way. Mastrovito reanimated — literally — this story as well, with NYsferatu: Symphony of a Century (2017), a silent film comprised of thousands of hand-drawn stills, playing out the classic film in present-day New York City. Underlining the perpetual threat of the Other, Mastrovito engaged local immigrant communities to share their stories, who often speak from the perspective of the Other, on carrying the ambiguous threat of the strange — the stranger — with them wherever they eventually settle.
In mid-2021, as COVID restrictions eased, Mastrovito presented Sous rature at Wilde Gallery in Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Martin Heidegger’s, and, subsequently, Jacques Derrida’s, principle of something existing “under erasure” — of crossing out a word without removing it, keeping it legible. Many of the works played out of this concept, constructed from either the tools of erasure or erasure itself, leaving marks over marks, taking away by adding: by filtering everything through Maya’s Veil, any material he uses will show us what is behind it. Zombies and vampires, figures between life and death, populate his feature-length film as dynamic figures of rature; frottage takes one sign and gives two — two that are polar opposites of each other; carved out slate blackboards leave a drawing by taking it away.
Sixty thousand small, rectangular pencil erasers neatly tile the floors of the gallery. Like the foam mats that cover gyms and daycare center floors, these serial erasers soften sounds and footsteps. Referred to as “rubber rooms,” psychiatric hospitals pad the walls with cushions to protect the often involuntary patients from harming themselves. It also resembles Holocaust memorials, notably the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. We can start over and get a clean slate, even in memoriam, but, in the end, we will all disappear into silence anyway. We will all be walked over, too.
Andrea’s movie I Am Not Legend ends similarly: showing us by taking away. His application of sous rature onto nearly 100,000 hand-painted, scanned, and reanimated film stills horrify as a series of eerie negatives. It begins by whitening the figures out and then replacing the original script with carefully chosen quotations from famous poems, fiction, songs, and other films, each one losing its individuality to the collective feeling. The other product of his erasure is a series of six vintage Italian blackboards, appearing to be covered by chalk but are instead carved up by an X-Acto knife and finessed with sandpaper — a source of both mark-making and erasure. The school-aged prop offers one last chance for the departing student to make a final mark — often by carving their initials, expletives, or profanity into the classroom chalkboard right before graduating. Each drawing surface, framed in heavy wood, reanimates a fable whose legend also centers around the concept of erasure.
Three of these works illustrate the Latin tradition of damnatio memoriae, or condemnation of memory, of retroactively removing someone from the historical record. Columbus (all works 2021) depicts a statue of the colonizer under wraps, his tri-pointed sailor’s hat poking out the upper contours of his form under a tarp, tied tightly under twines and ropes, ready to be physically removed from its plinth by crane. The last several years have caught up to Columbus’s record as a leader in the “New World,” and dozens of statues have been removed from town squares as history is edited to reflect his more accurate history as a leader of genocides against indigenous peoples. Around the same time that Columbus “discovered” America, he nearly erased the Taíno people at his first point of arrival on the island of Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Columbus huddles with two hooded crane operators on the platform of the mechanical crane in the chalkboard scene. Through the anonymous workers — resembling Man Ray’s Enigma of Isidor Ducasse (1920) in both blanketed form and as a potential threat within the fabric — are responsible for pulling the statue into its new home underwater, they are also unable to see what exactly they are tasked with, let alone why. They offer us no identifiable motive or plan of execution.
Concepts can be struck from public records as well. Les roses d’Héliogabale recreates Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1888 painting of the fourteen-year-old trans-Roman emporer Elagabalus reclining in sumptuous drapes of gold fabric while hosting a banquet that is awash in a torrent of pink rose petals, a modest, Victorian-era blanket over the decadent scene, which also smothers his guests as we watches from above. It follows in the footsteps of other massacres by flowers from Augustan history. Mastrovito’s Les roses d’Héliogabale moves the scene to a forest, where figures have heads of geometric shapes, groping around the forest with their eyes obscured. The conical-headed figure resembles a student wearing a dunce cap pulled down to the collarbone, arms up in the air in celebration during the blind tragedy. Another figure next to them, who has a “solid of Meloncholy” from Dürer’s Melencolia I for a geometric head, sinks deeper into the sense of hopelessness — and the rose petals. The artist’s “primitive” heads, modeled after early manmade ancient trinkets or tools, symbolize both our endless cycle of reliving history as much as society’s rigidity, refusing to deal with a changing world by simply looking away, sticking our heads in the sand — or, here, rather, in the cone or the shell.
On another chalkboard, the nineteenth-century public tribute to a sixteenth-century slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston faces a similar fate. After being wrapped and bound in a tarp, a crowd — a part of the summer 2020 anti-racism protests that swept so many corners of the world after the police murdered George Floyd in the U.S. — pushes the dismantled bronze sculpture into Bristol Harbor. The heavy upside-down figure sank head-first to his subsequent death, this time into his own pool of rose petals. The protesters in Colston, whose faces are blurred and hidden behind the person or the cell phone in front of them, leave no room for debate or nuance in their mass actions and instead take out their phones and cameras to document the spectacle of the fallen statue and an ensuing splash of flowers. Truth never lies entirely on one side, but the crowd has already acted as judge and jury in its ruling of whether the subject is good or evil.
Autodafé, a play on auto-da-fé, or an act of faith, illustrates the Inquisition-era tradition of burning heretics at the stake. Children don hollow-eyed beaked bubonic plague masks, playing out what was often the last vision a sick person had before dying of the disease. They play hopscotch on piles of burning books banned at one point or another, one of Mastrovito’s most prominent motifs, The Satanic Verses, Animal Farm, and Ma Jian’s 2008 novel Beijing Coma among them. In another work, young women wade in and drink the water from Léthé, one of the five rivers of Hades, which causes complete forgetfulness. The three maidens hang off a tree branch, one sporting a mysterious dodecahedron-shaped ancient artifact, unidentifiable in utility but found throughout archeological sites. In the work Clio, the Greek Muse of history takes an eraser to a skull, the first in a field of skulls awaiting her touch. It is impossible to tell whether she is using the eraser to erase the bones of gesturing the erasure lines to create more skulls around her. Neither pursuit will let us forget.