Bianco-Valente, Looking Through, 2019
Just the other day we were thinking about constellations and about the fact that man, since the dawn of time, has felt the need to tie groups of stars together through imaginary lines which are not visible in the night sky, giving them shapes, names, symbologies. Constellations and planets, linked themselves together in a mythological scenario, have personified countless stories that have been handed down from generation to generation, first orally and then through writing up to us.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the brain phenomena underlying perception work in the same way: every time we are faced with something unknown, never experienced before, the raw data that flows from our sensory network to the brain are put in relation with the baggage of previous experiences, with the memory of all the phenomena, with the constellations of people, places and objects with which we had the opportunity to relate in the past.
Only in this way, by comparing our sensory stimulus with the proven experience we are able to give a name to things, to imagine how a place, a person or an object is linked to everything else.
The artist's work is based exactly on these principles: making the invisible visible, suggesting, evoking, bringing out the subtle network of connections that keeps events, people and places tied together, in space and time.
In these processes there is little space for the news, for technologies, for the habit or affection for expressive means and one's desires, instead it is necessary to go to the root of the questions, get to the instinctive impulses that characterize man, which apparently rule him.
It is necessary to keep asking questions that seem to have no answer, to keep looking for the true meaning of our existence, to practice the playing field of philosophers and men of faith seeking, if possible, new perspectives from which to observe the existing.
We need to be prepared to turn our projects upside down at any time, accepting lightly the imprinting given by time, place, people who work with us, every time we express a thought that from our mind tries to adapt to external reality.
Thinking about it, all these small accidents along the way make our work fully vital, contemporary and necessary.
We must accept the idea that we can only structure and initiate interaction processes that we will no longer be able to fully control over time. We can’t presume to take into account and model all the variables that animate the processes related to complexity.
Don't worry, things will go exactly as they should.
If the loss of all certainties is scary, if it is not bearable that the horizons of meaning appear so far, frayed, unusable for orientation, you can always decide to work in a defined, uncomplicated, unproblematic space, where surely it will be possible to control everything, but from which only obvious and irrelevant artworks will emerge with a perspective that will barely frame our ego, only that.
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Reference Readings: Kocku von Stuckrad, Storia dell'astrologia; Chris Vogler, Il viaggio dell'eroe; Ciro Discepolo, Transiti e rivoluzioni solari; Giorgio Falco, Ipotesi di una sconfitta; Rupert Sheldrake, La mente estesa; Gregory Bateson, Mente e natura.