AESTHETICS OF CONVERGENCE BODY-BEYOND-MATTER CO-EXISTENCE COMMUNICATIVE ARTISTIC ORGANISMS COSMIC-FABRIC-WEAVE NOMADIC-ETHICS RUINS TRANSDISCIPLINARITY VULNERABILITY
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 artistic devices as traces of a path, indicators of movement, and suggestions of passage. The pursuit is not for aesthetic perfection but rather driven by the impulse to destroy any visible form and content that might represent a commercial culture. The tension applied to expressive means manifests through a temporal patina, inducing a rapid alchemical process of decay and ruin, as described by the sociologist Georg Simmel.
As artists, acting as raw material in the invention of the blending of creative practices, we are called to develop the ability to see what remains of the concrete experience of the present, beyond the fashions of art, consumption, and contemporary communication, destined to be constantly consumed in an inexhaustible ephemeral pursuit.
It is necessary to have the courage to assert that the heart of art lies elsewhere. The artistic devices at the center of research, starting from grammar, are not created to be simply observed, or at least this is not their 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 as a communicating device that seeks to re-establish a complex symmetry between the artist and the other, between culture and nature. Its existence is a cosmic fabric, a weave devoid of a specific organic form, which is part of the dynamic ecosystem we share with our humanity.
Through the concept of ruin as a creative mechanism, two distinctive, opposing, heterogeneous, and inseparable forces manifest in the devices: the heaviness of matter and the spirit of nature, which meet within the matter itself, creating an aesthetic-of-convergence unity. This unity, maintaining the original enmity of the parts, is now imbued with a new ethical significance that generates diverse regions of meaning.
In the simultaneity of intuition and thought, dynamically shifting its boundaries within the device, the conflict between the downward push (of matter) and the upward push (of spirit), between purpose and accident, between aesthetic nature and ethical nature, between past and present, between what is no longer and what is not yet, is never completely resolved. There remains an unresolved coexistence, a deep tension between their oppositions, manifesting in a dense and permeable unity that opposes the compact and structured unity that no form can ever achieve without opening up to all antagonistic currents.
The active result derived 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 out its deep connections for the viewer, involving them in an authentic and impenetrable experience with 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, within a continuously evolving exposition, as no longer the synthesis of a formal construction but, following a Teilhardian vision, rather a fabric, a weave of unfinished experience. This process nourishes a progressive acquisition of dissolution in the artifice of things, as a process of reappropriation and re-signification of the world.
All this represents the result of the transition from avant-garde research focused on abstract categories like space-time, to the subsequent elaboration of a new style of subjective action, reflected in things.
Unfortunately, we must continue to philosophize to create contemporary art, keeping in mind what Pierre Lévy, a French philosopher studying the impact of the Internet on society, supports. Either we fully live our emotions, perceiving them as events of our flow of experience, or we think that they represent reality, and thus we have the task of constructing them as a scene, realizing them. When emotions materialize, continuously generating other emotions and thoughts, when they transform into words and push us to act, they lock us even more in the real prison that we never stop producing the illusion.
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