Maurizio Mercuri's "Bar Picture" presses hard the accelerator of the playful paradox and conceptual lightness.
In fact the picture hides, in its doble bottom, a micro-bar full of mignon bottles. In Mercuri's works the ordinary mental processes are subject to unexpected deviations from meaning in order to escape from the routine hidden in everyday life as well as in art.Therefore in the artist's work the dimension of art and that of life subtlety crash, a taste for representation is opposed to other forms of pleasure which, instead, directly stimulate us through the senses. In this work "luxury" and art are subject to a pleasant and original short circuit.We must not forget that the "mental" lightness that runs trough the works of the artists of the Nineties is fully tuned in to the dematerialization typical of the electronic dimension. As matter of fact the image represented in the bar picture is the transposition of a computer icon that the artist has transferred using the manual skill of drawing/painting. But, besides, the work poises on the border between two areas that rarely come into touch: the area of design and that of art. In fact the possibility of a functionality, which is usually typical of design, becomes the characterizing element of an original work open to extreme and engaging solutions. Instead Mercuri's photographs are the fruit of a lyricism which confronts with reality. Some batteries without the foreseeable label, or piles of books placed near geometrical forms became ghost-objects in an atmosphere of research on the essence of the objects themselves.