‘I have always described the face of the neighbour as the bearer of an order, which imposes a gratuitous - and inalienable - responsibility on the self towards the other, as if the self were elected and unique - and where the other man is absolutely other, that is, still incomparable and, thus, unique. But the men around me are many! Hence the problem: who is my neighbour?’ (Emmanuel Levinas, Violence of the Face, 1985)

 -The questions “Who is my neighbour?” and “Who am I?” are very often at the heart of the artistic research of two pure and complementary artists, Caterina Pini and Saverio Feligini. In their studio in Rome, Caterina and Saverio also share a work on the human and inhuman face.

 -Among many forms covered by the work of the two artists, the one of the human face in its expressiveness, and inhuman in its artificiality, is in fact the main paths, a research itinerary that inherits the most daring suggestions from contemporary art.

-If, as Levinas wrote, the human face violently poses, understood as an inescapable proposition, the reality of being Other, what could be frankness -even naivety- as we know it is instead the space of the mask, of the character, that is of the person.

-Mimicking the facial expressions of one's fellows, the human being from his earliest months of life learns the mask, which is, in its simplicity, the communication of states of mind in social relations, beyond the instantaneous and unmediated, up to that moment, communication of emotions.

-Society teaches in the most disparate ways to stage the character of ‘who I am’, mediating even facial expressions towards a construction of mask (and character armour) that protects us from the predatory incursions of the Other, who also plays for ourselves, in the mirror, an acceptable version of the ego.

 -Caterina Pini, in her multi-coloured scribbled faces, recounts the fleeting impressions of the ‘violent face’ of the Other, as fleeting as a snapshot of an entrance to the underground can be, with its thousand colour-emotions and its thousand grimaces, even hidden beneath often petrified, feignedly imperturbable faces.

 -So the artist, behind the filamentous mask of a smile, yes, but unbalanced, of an elongated muzzle, or of a wide-open eye, captures that in which one cannot completely immerse oneself, on pain of disorientation: the emotion of the Other.

 -Caterina Pini's work takes from 20th century art a vision that is no longer a search for the reproduction of the perfect person in its balance with nature and culture, but one that, from Cubist decomposition to Baconian liquefaction, undermines the mask. From the colours and skilful garbles full of energy of the faces drawn by Pini, one must become emotionally involved.

 -Saverio Feligini, a collagist, makes a completely different and complementary operation to Pini's: his elegant faces set in atmospheres constructed with glossy paper should be looked at with the awareness that one is seeing an ironic renversement operation, because it is the magazine cuttings that tell us how to dress, how to look, how to act (Feligini writes ‘how to be adequate’) that create these mute characters.

-So Feligini builds metropolitan or classical scenarios, large triptychs or small panels, in which mysterious figures inhabit, reminding us of veiled or shielded Magrittian faces or the classicism of a De Chirico.

 -Feligini's ambition is not only to shed light on the puppets of the characters' falsehood but to give this two-dimensional blob a dignity as if these “canvases” could be displayed in new tabernacles. The criticism of the society of appearance thus also includes the overt criticism of art as a celebration of status or of itself.

 -It is no coincidence that Pini's and Feligini's works in their portfolios and exhibitions often lack frames altogether; the aim is to be finished works as such, no matter what size. Certainly one trait that the two artists have in common is the search for a balance that is far from iconoclastic complacency and very close instead to playfulness.

 -Our society, complex and offering a myriad of ‘connections’ with others, loses itself in the doubt of not knowing them at all, these unknown faces, this mass of faces and mediatised expressions: ‘who is my neighbour?’ writes Levinas, ‘who knows who he is?’ asks the well-known free-to-air TV programme... Feligini and Pini are among those artists who seek authenticity in the mask.

 -And it is precisely today, a long way from the description of the Parresiastian citizen, frank and forthright, not afraid to tell the truth, described by Plato, paid homage to in Socrates, evoked by Foucault, that Pini and Feligini's search for truth in the Other returns as a hot topic not only in mass politics (always a slave to propaganda), in the social media, but in the streets and squares of our cities, with the biometric recognition of faces.

 -Recognition' of the Other becomes, in the society endowed with artificial intelligence tools, the recognition of the Other for the purposes of behavioural study and policing, because so-called “somatic features” and emotions are computable and recognisable. We then move from the human and empathic scenarios of the two artists to dystopian scenarios in which facial expressions are not only corrected and made up, emphasised and used to attract the attention of others for commercial or manipulative purposes, ... but totally hidden.

 -then Pini's iridescent faces, and Feligini's metaphysical ovals, become an escape route from a reality in which no one can afford uncalculated, unplanned expressions, unsuited to the circumstances, with the fear of being filmed by a thousand digital eyes, whether in our polymorphous mobile phones, high up on poles or inside a pair of glasses.

            Francesca  Palazzi Arduini  (dadaknorr.it)