Sandra Mauro

Sandra Mauro seeks to express vitality and energyby focusing on the theme of nature. Her approach, essentially formalist and sensitive, frees itself from the distinction between abstraction and figuration. She draws from her visual field and takes forms and colors. Vegetation, flowers, petals, pistils. From the forms, she abandons the detail. From the colors, she explores the power and digs the sensation that the eye receives. In her different series, she explores the idea of a presence as well as its loss - what is there and what is lost from sight, in-between, both manifest and changing, contours and indistinct matter, between abstraction and nature, appearance and disappearance, strength and fragility - of what she sees and perceives. Painting, her primary expression, interests her in its extensions of territory, in its porosities and its contacts with other forms. These photographs have the appearance of dematerialized painting, attempt to disturb, explore the relationship between painting and photography. They are photographs of a painter, not a photographer. She looks for a visual matter, a blur, a grain. The important thing is the abandonment of the sharpness, until not being able to make the point any more. The immateriality of these works, experienced as paintings, interests her, calls for another dimension, strong, evocative and undoubtedly, for her, more alive.

"Infinitely large or infinitely small? The eye seeks to accommodate. But there will never be a point. The image, resisting, does not let itself be submitted. Is it the tip of a breast that one glimpses, or the curve of a pearly pearl? One will not know. Then, we try again and again to adjust but nothing makes it. One insists, one persists - one fights - but in vain. We get lost. We must give up. Or, more exactly, leaving them the bridle on the neck, to finally trust our senses to plunge in the mysterious and phantasmagorical delights of the unknown and the doubt. This is precisely the moment when "painting" has won. So much the better." 

Laurent Sbernini, 2020