Maurizio Anzeri

Pop Culture Axiom #83,576: a good persona is an invisible persona. If you can play a role to perfection, then you can transgress almost any social boundary and no one will be the wiser, but one slip and you’re a total joke. What’s the one key difference between the Trix Rabbit and James Bond? Chronic wardrobe malfunctions. Otherwise he’d just be a total badass con artist who gets tons of free cereal. Instead, he’s mocked by children and presumably left to starve to death.

The barely convincing phony trying to pass itself off on society has been a comedic trope for centuries. It’s the kind of reassuring absurdity that makes us in the audience feel shrewd and discerning. We believe we can safely distinguish between what is fun and fantastical and what is simply too good to be true and have a nice laugh about the whole thing afterwards. Of course, the downside of all this synthetic certainty is that it can stagnate our desires and expectations. Behind every strange and novel encounter lurks the phantom of banality. We stare blankly at life’s weird beauty, waiting impatiently for it to resolve itself into some known category. What’s the joke? I don’t get it.

The point of this meandering two paragraph preamble is all to explain why I felt like I had to retool my entire, deeply culturally engrained thought processes in order to fully appreciate the embroidered images of Maurizio Anzeri. The woven patterns which obscure the figures’ faces are like too-transparent masks or overly substantial spirits. My natural inclination was to try to intuit which presence represented the true identity. Were these divine and demonic entities pretending to be human or vice versa?

The fact is, these ain’t no trompe lo’eil. None of the elements in Anzeri’s work are more real than the other, nor do they strive to convince you otherwise. It’s more like those old Magic Eye pictures where the mode of observation causes certain things to fall into relief while others float to the surface. Each viewing of a particular photo presents a different, contradictory configuration and yet all are simultaneously true. Unless you want to puzzle over a pointless paradox ad infinitum, you’ll have to try embracing ambiguity.