Elisabetta Catalano - Work with Fabio Mauri

The fruitful collaboration between Elisabetta Catalano and Fabio Mauri start at the beginning of the 1960s in the studio of via dell’Oca, the same studio where the old friends of the Scuola di piazza del Popolo used to meet up, where American artists like De Kooning arrived and where late-night conversations took place. Mauri commissions the young photographer and partner to document his Screens: this series of works is Mauri’s peculiar and extremely innovative version of the monochrome, the most extreme way of reducing the painting to zero. The artist’s interpretation of the monochrome is that of a virtual space that can take on any image and is combined with a reference to cinema and mind’s projections. Catalano takes pictures of the Screens in line on the floor. This is the first, almost prehistoric stage of a collaboration that will result successfully and beautifully in a series of highly iconic images. Always during this phase, the pictures for the pop comedy “The island” are taken.