From these static tableaux it was a small step to live performances. Masi came to London in 1967 to study at the Slade School of Art and felt the need to comment on the daily experience of urban life. Broughtup in a small country town in West Virginia, USA, hefound citiesboth stimulating and repressive. He began in 1970 to create images of self-persecution as a metaphor of the stress and tension of urban life. Small wounds, such as cuts and scratches, were aggravated and then photographed. In other works the artist appears naked from the waist, his head covered with a bag, or distorted by tightly bound bandages, his arms wrapped around his body as though tied in a straight jacket. This image of the passive sufferer, a victim of cruelty and indifference, is adescendant from saints and martyrs that people art history. A new element of impotent rage and frustration has been introduced, though, coupled with references to sophisticated forms of modern torture and interrogation techniques such as sensory deprivation which lift these images out of the art history context and make them pertinent to a contemporary audience. In them art history and modern life have been successfully merged. Private performances were recorded on videotape and then rephotographed to create sequences of stills, suggesting that the static icons, drawing and painting, were still important.

Next the artist began to make a conflicting record of the same theme. His face, rephotographed in close-up from the monitor portrays extreme emotion such as anguish or terror, while another shot taken simultaneously shows him in the studio environment dwarfed by the gadgetry of lights and cameras. Stark effects, harsh and melodramatic lighting are used along with static frontal poses either to heighten emotional intensity or to exaggerate the cold impersonality of advancing technology, and the surroundings created by it. The juxtapositioning of these two sets of images implies a causal connection. Hysteria, Masi seems to say, is a natural and reasonable response - an expression of the human predicament in the high technology of twentieth century life.

In 1973 Masi's work changed again. He began to photograph domestic interiors empty of people. The obviously artificial and minimal sets of the earlier pieces is replaced by the seemingly friendly warmth of found interiors. Stark lighting gives way to gentler greys and subtle modulated tones, sharp focus to visual softness. Simple compositions are replaced by spacial ambiguity of reflections, shadows and transparent surfaces. A sense of mystery and expectation pervades these pictures. Empty chairs and beautiful objects, apparently cherished and arranged with great care, signify the absent occupants. The lamp waits to be switched on and the stillness to be broken. The dramatic confrontation of the earlier tableaux gives way to a more subtle sense of nostalgia. Scenes depicted in the artist's own home, laid out with the same immaculate precision as his studio sets, like a still life for living in. Art and life once more coalesce, as the person awaited is the artist himself. Physically present in earlier pieces, but his identity hidden by a mask or his head covered with a bag, he is now presented by the objects that he cares for.

Two years later, in 1975, Denis Masi began to fabricate sets once more, building them at first to mimic his living space, but gradually becoming sparser and less human. Domestic intimacy developed into the more formal and public terrain of office life, and tables are replaced by desks, and armchairs by office furniture. Both sets and their photographic equivalents were exhibited side by side as a dual presentation of two realities, both equally chilling and impersonal. A cold light filters through the venetian blind and glints off the rim of tubular steel chairs or the shiny surface of a glass tabletop. The materials are man-made, colourless and unsympathetic to the touch. The mood of charismatic absence changes into one of impersonal emptiness.

'Absence', whether nostalgic or fearful forms the link in all Masi's work from his early performance sets, his photographic tableaux to his present installations. In these latest works the melodrama and emotional intensity of the performance works has been merged with the alienation of high-tech environments to create constructions that are stark and theatrical, yet rich with reference to daily life. The imagery has matured and become more complex as animals are introduced into the scene to create conflicting loyalties or sympathies. The audience is invited to participate, either mentally or physically, in weaving the narrative threads that the scene offers. The human agent has been removed from the work and relocated either in the viewer or in the menacing " human understood" to establish a three-way dialogue of tension between the various protagonists, whether animal, victim or aggressor, real or imagined.

April 1979