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

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

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

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

-By mimicking the facial expressions of his fellow men, the human being from his first months of life learns the mask, which is, in its simplicity, the communication of states of mind in social relationships, beyond the instantaneous and unmediated, up to that moment, of emotions.

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

-Caterina Pini, in her faces scribbled in many colors, tells the fleeting impressions of the "violent face" of the other, fleeting as a snapshot of entering the subway can be, with its thousand colors-emotions and its thousand grimaces, also hidden under often petrified faces, falsely imperturbable.

-Thus the artist, behind the filamentary mask of a smile, yes, but crooked, of an elongated muzzle, or of a wide-open eye, captures what one cannot fully immerse oneself in, under penalty of disorientation: the emotion of the Other.

- Caterina Pini's work takes from twentieth-century art a vision that is no longer a search for the reproduction of the perfect person in his balance with nature and culture but that, from cubist decomposition to Baconian liquefaction, puts the mask in crisis. The colors and wise tangles full of energy of the faces drawn by Pini must be emotionally involved.

- Saverio Feligini, a collagist, does a completely different and complementary operation to that of Pini: his elegant faces set in atmospheres constructed with glossy paper must be looked at with the awareness that we are seeing an ironic operation of renversement, because it is the magazine clippings that tell us how to dress, how to look, how to behave (Feligini writes "how to be adequate") that create these silent characters.

-Thus Feligini builds metropolitan scenographies or classical scenarios, large triptychs or small panels, in which mysterious figures live, which remind us of veiled or screened faces of Magritte or the classicism of a De Chirico.

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

-It is no coincidence that the works of Pini and Feligini in their portfolios and exhibitions often lack frames entirely, the aim is to be finished works as such, no matter what size. Certainly a trait that unites the two artists is the search for a balance far from iconoclastic complacency and very close instead to play.

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

-And it is precisely today, now a long distance from the description of the Parrhesiast citizen, frank and sincere, who is not afraid to tell the truth, described by Plato, honored in Socrates, recalled by Foucault, that the search for truth in the Other of Pini and Feligini becomes a hot topic again not only in mass politics (always a slave to propaganda), in social media, but in the streets and squares of our cities, with biometric recognition of faces.

-“Recognizing” the Other becomes, in the society equipped with artificial intelligence tools, recognizing it for the purposes of behavioral study and policing, because the so-called “somatic traits” and emotions are computable and recognizable. We then move from the human and empathetic scenarios of the two artists to dystopian scenarios in which the facial expression is not only corrected and made up, emphasized and used to attract the attention of others for commercial or manipulative purposes, … but totally hidden.

-Then the iridescent faces of Pini, and the metaphysical ovals of Feligini, become an escape route from a reality in which no one can allow themselves expressions that are not calculated, not planned, not suited to the circumstances, with the fear of being filmed by a thousand digital eyes, whether they are in our cellular polymorphs, high up on poles or inside a pair of glasses.

Notes by Francesca Palazzi Arduini (dadaknorr.it) on Open Studio by Caterina Pini and Saverio Feligini, Rome, RAW 2024.