Wondering just how I Am Not Legend may be included within Andrea Mastrovito’s production may not push us to do any more than merely underline the natural link between this second film and the first, NYsferatu, nor might it prove to be a satisfactory answer if we were to spoil as many details as possible of the upcoming film, with which the artist would like to conclude his trilogy. Putting this work in the right perspective means bearing in mind that the artist’s poetics and strength of thought have always driven him towards a sort of generic creative bulimia – of which traces may indeed be found – but at the same time towards a general versatility in his choice of media, the upshot of an all-consuming voracity towards the whole of reality, in a conception of the world as a substance to be used for his own expressivity, to be folded and englobed within it.
In Mastrovito’s meat grinder, there is no human matter or material that will not be swallowed up in his work sooner or later. In this process, drawing is far more than a distinctive stroke, a signature of the artist: it’s the primary gesture of that indelible process of the appropriation of matter, and it is destined to spawn across every surface with which it comes into contact. His action is reminiscent of that slightly trivial gesture made by children to say “it’s mine,” or rather, so as not to share so much as a morsel of some succulent dish, licking it over brazenly in various points, generating repulsion in any friends nearby who might have otherwise asked for a bite. Besides the somewhat beastly imagery – an essential feature after all in Mastrovito’s expressivity, just as much as drama and grace are – in the incessant search for original media and supports, this need for the appropriation of reality finds a tentative response of which the consequence is their inclusion within a narrative, conceptual and aesthetic process, thus ennobling them. It’s a tendency towards reappropriation which, of course, stands in turn on the freeing of artistic materials which took place over the twentieth century.