Signed by the artist An artist and playwright, founder of two critical magazines, and a leading figure in the Italian avant-garde since the 1950s, Mauri interweaves history and individual destiny in his poetics, which unfolds over the first eighteen years of his life: war, conversion, madness, the drama of his Jewish friends who never returned, and the discovery of real fascism. This monograph explores what has always been the central theme of the artist's poetics: a reflection on art expressed through the tones most congenial to him, those of ideological tension, as an allusion to the dramatic condition of man in the dialectic between structure and matter, between form, image, and history.