Portraits in the crowd, 2007

Denis Masi's early career was a sweep across the artistic and political landscape of the West as he moved from his native United States to Milan in 1964 and then, after spending 1966-67 in Paris, settled in London where he has lived and worked since. His art shows a similarly sweeping approach with a strong political content presented in a variety of media and merging influences from various avant-garde movements of the time. In the 1970s, he developed striking tableaux of objects and stuffed animals, carefully arranged and posed for symbolic and metaphorical effect, echoing the assemblages of Italian Arte Povera but revealing a much more analytical approach, closer in method to the conceptual art that developed in the United Kingdom and, to some extent, in the United States. In later years, Masi has increasingly incorporated photography into his presentation, employing it with the same precision and political acuity as before.
The work in this exhibition is concerned with crowds and the social sphere and uses 'captured' photographs – freeze-frame shots that show people, not posed, at the very point where the boundary of the self and the social becomes blurred, where individual identity is partially relinquished to the group and we experience the exhilarating empowerment of the crowd. 'In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person,' wrote Elias Canetti in his seminal study of the subject, Crowds and Power, and this transcendence is at once liberating and alarming, representing the birth of a social identity but at the possible cost of eroding both individual identity and one's scruples: The crowd has a dynamic of its own and is a fearsome power for good or bad. Masi's exploration of the theme is primarily hopeful, a celebration of the social sphere which we must see as an antidote to an increasing individualism and isolation – the alienation of the subject in our late-capitalistic societies which has been one of Masi's primary concerns throughout. The inclusion of a photograph of Jacques Derrida, looking straight at the camera with a bemused smile, may indicate a more ambivalent reading, reminding us of the impossibility of ever bridging the ontological gap that separates us from each other and our own destiny. As always, Masi favours the subtle analytic over the obvious.

Jón Proppé, critic and curator in Reykjavík, Iceland