Which is the artwork? The one inside the oval frame or the one arranged all around it? One might say both, being that it was Ugo Mulas who created this image. The Milanese photographer sees what is inside the images he frames, and by doing so, while shooting, he multiplies the image itself. How? Creating space. His art could be defined as extensive. Some mystery surrounds this concept: it all seems to take shape as if it were born from space itself in that moment, and this only because he photographed it. After all, in these works he is capturing not just any work, but the drawings of Saul Steinberg, the genius of extended space, both in a spatial and a temporal sense. Steinberg is someone who manages to create spaces within other spaces with his sign, in a sort of prodigious progressive growth.
On December 5th 1961 Saul Steinberg completed the engraving of the walls of the atrium of the building owned by Astorre Mayer, located in via Bigli n°5 in Milan. His signature is on the wall. Mayer, a Milanese industrialist, entrusted the renovation of the building to Ernesto Nathan Rogers, one of the great Italian architects of his time. Steinberg was then called by him, because Rogers had already collaborated with the great designer, or, rather, the great writer of drawings, at the Triennale for the “Labirinto dei bambini".
As is usually the case in buildings worthy of such a name, one enters the house through a large entrance hall with a concierge, a typical Milanese peculiarity, much like the atrium that then leads from the street to the internal garden. Steinberg works on fresh plaster with the graffito technique: as soon as the groove is traced it is immediately blackened, so that the result seems to have been drawn by a pen directly on the wall.
Mulas arrived a month and a half later, on January 24th 1962, and began shooting several rolls of film with a Hasselblad camera, in order to document the work of the New York artist (who actually was Romanian-Italian-American) .
In Mulas' photographs the walls appear covered in sketches drawn without a real plan: an immense scribble sketched on an enormous sheet of paper. Mulas took over 200 photographs of that inventive masterpiece, almost a graphic unconscious of Steinberg, of which no trace remains. In 1998, after the owner's death, the building was brutally renovated and the walls tampered with. Thus the work of the American artist, shattered into pieces, ended up among the waste of a landfill. A true crime.
Fortunately these images are still in existence and are now on display in a Turin exhibition at “Camera”, accompanied by a catalog: Saul Steinberg/Ugo Mulas, Graffiti (edited by Dario Borso, Dario Cimorelli Editore). It is a precious document that allows entry in the imaginative world of Saul Steinberg. Mulas leads us by the hand into the artist's mental and visual work. The result, that is a true reading of the artist's work - photography not only as a visual act, but as a critical one as well - is facilitated by a typescript that Steinberg gave to the photographer and that has been among his papers for many decades. This is a sort of "explanation" of what is on the walls: a reading provided by the author in didactic form.

Mulas follows the typewritten lines step by step. They are written by Steinberg in an extraordinary and paratactic Italian. What does the work as a whole represent? Better said: what are its dominant motifs? They are: the theme of the Labyrinth, with Theseus and the Minotaur, envisioned through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, which is another visual topos of the artist; and four heroes: Candide, Theseus (or Ariadne), Don Quixote and Joyce.
Claudio Bartocci explained in a polished and extensive essay, collected in AZ Steinberg (Electa, 2021), the bond that exists between Steinberg and Joyce, and how the artist, a true migrant, identified with the Irish writer; it is no coincidence that Joyce titled one of his books “Dedalus. Portrait of the artist as a young man” (1916).
Ugo Mulas photographed the fresco-graffiti in two different manners: on the one hand, he documented the general composition of the environments, while on the other hand he focused on the details of the individual signs, which seem to flourish one from another in a simultaneously propagating and continuous growth. In other words, he did not lose sight of the general idea, while at the same time pursuing the individual images by looking at them closely, and that is the sense of vertigo offered by Steinberg's drawings: they are to be looked at as an ensemble, but one ends up getting lost in the observation of the individual details.
Mulas looks through the lens and shoots. He knows well that this oneiric fresco cannot be fully grasped, so he limits himself to giving space to individual graffiti, and this is no small feat. He gives a form back to the labyrinth of Via Bigli n°5, but without omitting the obsession that lies within it. The owner of the house had also felt this obsession, confiding to the architect Nathan Rogers that he too had been disturbed by the allusion, through Don Quixote, to the themes of fear, madness and hatred placed at the entrance of the house. However elegant it may be, Steinberg's Labyrinth undoubtedly contains some disturbing elements. Ugo Mulas provides us with a harmonious yet tense sign without ever leaving any part of it out , as we can see in the image of the caretaker on the telephone inside the oval concierge. He manages to achieve an almost perfect visual synthesis. It is so that we are made to ask ourselves, by looking at the shot: who is more real, the man inside the porthole or the drawings that surround him out there?