Reflecting on Nietzsche’s concept of the greatness of man, we can consider the artistic device as a bridge rather than an ultimate end. This perspective becomes particularly relevant in a world that is increasingly losing substance, sacredness, and truth.
Reinterpreting concepts such as transition and decline, and once again referring to Nietzsche, the pigments act within my artistic devices as traces of a path, indicators of movement, and suggestions of passage. I am not seeking aesthetic perfection but am driven by the impulse to destroy any visible form and content that may represent a commodified culture. The tension applied to my expressive means manifests through a temporal patina, inducing a rapid alchemical process of decay and ruin, as described by the sociologist Georg Simmel.
As an artist, acting as raw material in the invention of my blend of creative practices, I am called to develop the ability to see what remains of the concrete experience of the present, beyond the trends of art, consumption, and contemporary communication, destined to be constantly consumed in an inexhaustible ephemeral pursuit. It is necessary to have the courage to affirm that the heart of art resides elsewhere.
My artistic device, starting from grammar, was not created to be simply observed, or at least that is not its primary function. Recalling a reflection by philosopher Bruno Latour on hybrid structures, once the stable value of form is consumed, it becomes a transparent passage and, consequently, no longer functions as a model in itself but rather as communicative device that seeks to restore a complex symmetry between the artist and the other, between culture and nature. Its existence is a cosmic fabric, a texture devoid of a specific organic form, which is part of the dynamic ecosystem of which we are a part with our humanity.
Through the concept of ruin as a creative mechanism, two distinctive, opposing, heterogeneous, and inseparable forces manifest within my devices: the heaviness of matter and the spirit of nature, meeting within the matter itself, creating an aesthetic-convergence unity. This unity, while maintaining the original enmity of its parts, is now imbued with a new ethical meaning that generates different regions of significance.
In the simultaneity of intuition and thought, which dynamically shifts its boundaries within the device, the conflict between the downward impulse (of matter) and the upward impulse (of spirit), between purpose and accident, between aesthetic nature and ethical nature, between the past and the present, between what is no longer and what is not yet, is never fully resolved. An unresolved coexistence, a profound tension between their oppositions, is maintained, manifested in a dense and permeable unity that opposes the compact and structured unity that no form can ever achieve unless it opens itself to all antagonistic currents.
The active result that emerges from this artistic device, detached from the static universe of symbolic correspondences, is to become a true medium within a relational background. Despite the lack of harmony, it brings forth its deep connections to the beholder, engaging them in an authentic experience where the incessant and ineradicable movement of transformation would otherwise be impenetrable directly through their own body.
Recognizing the interconnectedness between nature and culture, in which we act by producing ruins, it is possible to think of this convergence device which, within an ever-evolving exhibition, is no longer the synthesis of a formal construct but, following a Teilhardian vision, rather a fabric, a texture of lived but unconcluded experience. This process fuels a progressive acquisition of dissolution in the artifice of things, as a process of reappropriation and resignification of the world.
Faced with fluctuations, incommensurable fractures, incomprehensible contingency, and the refractoriness of existence, the rigidity of symbolic form is broken, and as the canvas crumbles, cracks and fissures open up, wherein the spirit of the participant penetrates, traversing the exhibition surface like a shiver and a flash of light, projecting onto life itself the desire for redemption from its incoercible tragic nature, from its lacerating paradox.
All of this represents the result of the transition from avant-garde research focused on abstract categories such as space-time to the subsequent elaboration into a new style of active subjectivity, reflected in things.
Unfortunately, we must continue to philosophise to create contemporary art, keeping in mind what French philosopher Pierre Lévy, who studies the impact of the Internet on society, asserts. Either we fully experience emotions, perceiving them as events in our flow of experience, or we think that they represent reality, and thus, it is our task to construct them as a scene, realising them.
When emotions materialise, continuously generating other emotions and thoughts, when they transform into words and impel us to act, they further imprison us in the real prison that we never cease to produce: illusion