When the first models of independent culture began to form in the 1970s, that is when autonomous cultural organisation first struck out in an alternative direction to dominant mainstream paths, a new aesthetic developed too. This was a direct consequence of the conceptual approach towards the need for self-determination. We do not want to diminish the importance of the punk rebellion or the musical genesis of independent record labels, pirate radio stations and antagonistic political movements. However, what we are interested in highlighting here is the fact that the demands and aspirations of the individual, transverse communication and a new cultural as well as social understanding gradually came to light during those years of protest.
It was a widespread innovative ferment, both ideological and artistic in form, which freed people’s tastes and led them to experiment with all kinds of expression in total freedom. If those were the years of self-organisation, Do It Yourself and extreme collective expressionism, we now find ourselves experiencing a new revival of those sounds and rough, awkward visions. There is an attitude that has characterised a section of contemporary studies for some time now. It consists of the deliberate lack of ‘correctness’ that is now being expressed through the lo-fi revolution. Now that everyone can get the best of everything and ‘democratised’ digital technology offers affordable advanced performance, the tendency is to deviate and seek out a low definition effect, to contravene therefore the accepted order.
The trend takes in art and music as well as design and fashion, where sparse, homemade efforts and odd collages with bits and pieces taken from anywhere and everywhere, stuck together any which way, are taking over. The drive to recover the aesthetic in the everyday favours minimal interventions and focuses on micro events that open up the things around us to create an epiphany-like experience. These are subtle interventions, which may involve solely the intention of the artist. He or she can decide to isolate our view of such objects in order to make them communicate with us in a completely new way.
This direction includes strategies of the precarious aimed at emphasising the peripheral, the marginal or whatever may seem banal and useless at first glance. Yet if seen from another angle, they can easily lead to alternative interpretations.
The main thrust comes from an ironic, disillusioned attitude, extreme openness and a predisposition to change, the subversion of every pre-established concept and every accepted value, driven only by the search for new interpretive solutions. This attitude is often transmitted through the reclaiming of an ordinary object, which undergoes an alteration in terms of both form and function. Thus a profuse repertoire becomes part of the work, purposefully disinterested in correctness and actually pleased to manually recreate improbable means of interaction with the world....
....Maurizio Mercuri (Fabriano, 1965) works with disparate materials reclaimed from everyday life. He produces unusual combinations that can induce shifts in sense with sophisticated lightness. For example, the spider’s web of cracks created by the blow of a hammer onto an ordinary glass vase makes that object, without any inherent appeal, capture our attention. Or the pictures neatly displayed along the white walls of a gallery, chosen not for their artistic merit but because they perfectly conceal the holes made during a previous, ‘destructive’ performance.