These works are the result of a reflection following the visit of the Sansevero chapel in Naples.
Here, in addition to the famous Veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sanmartino, there are the creations suggesting the title of the exhibition: two models of the circulatory system, created around 1763 by Giuseppe Salerno, an anatomist from Palermo, on commission of the Prince of Sansevero Raimondo di Sangro. To achieve his task, Salerno used the skeletons of a man and a woman as the basis of his work.
The blood vessel systems of the models is so precise that had been believed to be natural for centuries; up to the point to feed the popular belief that the two bodies would have been the result of alchemical experiments conducted on two servants while still alive, to whom the prince would have injected a substance of his invention capable of transforming blood into metal and thus “safeguarding” the blood circuit.
If the boundary between imagination and reality is often so confused, what is instead clear is the continuous research of man who, starting from the study of himself, goes to the limits of his own reason (or faith), moved by an anodyne willingness to understand the divine. A research that has led human beings to imagine themselves as a perfect machine, enclosing the perfection of the divinity itself.
In this way, interpreting the perfection of the human body, its proportions, the complex functioning of the organs that compose it, as well as attempting to unravel the mysteries of birth, analysing the stages and the modes of growth, sublimate the fear of death, become steps of a cognitive process that brings man closer to God and, fatally, God closer to man.
From the mathematical investigation of Policleto, aimed at revealing the Absolute Beauty eventually theorized in his canons, continuing through the process of humanization of the gods of the Greek Olympus, finally arriving at the god of Christians who from pure spirit becomes man, religion, science , art have continually tried to explain the Absolute using man as a unit of measurement.
The idea of God, as the ultimate explanation of the miracle of the creation of the universe and of man in it, becomes for man a search for God within himself; this triggers a process so dear to the alchemists, whose most striking consequence is both the divinization of man and, at the same time, the humanization of God.
In the seventeenth century, the German theologian Angelus Silesius theorized in one of his mystical paradoxes that God, as the essence of infinite love, cannot love anything inferior: « am like God and God like me. I am as Large as God, He is as small as I. He cannot above me, nor I beneath him be.».
God and man, therefore, become One. God creates man who, in turn, creates God “.
We are therefore in the presence of an ambivalent creation of the creator. The same that we intend to reverberate in the exhibited works.
These, inspired by the anatomical machines from which we started to trace these notes, are developed by representing various figures with human or humanoid shapes.
The reference models are anatomical tables, anatomical drawings of famous authors or statues of classical deities such as the Venus de Milo or the Dorifero by Policleto.
The figures are made using the dripping technique, carried out by pouring pigmented resins directly on plexiglass supports; the rapid and immediate gestures, in the attempt to define the forms, create a “vascular” pattern in which the lines intertwine, recalling precisely a circulatory system.
And it is precisely in this process that ambiguity is expressed: the gestural freedom of action painting in fact clashes with the need to contain forms within limits that are often only intuitive. The gesture thus becomes an expression of duality, a tribute to our nature always poised between the promise of an imperturbable divine and the inalienable attraction of the magmatic manifestations of the world.
Showing all 12 results