IMMATERIAL SPACES
Half of beauty depends on the landscape and the other half on the man who gazes at it. (Lin Yu Tang)
Landscapes, and more landscapes. Not just the whole history of art, but that of mankind, is imbued with landscapes. The same artistic composition which, be it on canvas, or a sculpture, installation or photography, remains landscape as such. Even music is landscape.
Painting is poetry that can be seen but not heard, poetry is painting that can be heard but not seen. (Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519).
To Leonardo the landscape contains secret and hidden meanings; it is a form of communication that is only accessible to those who are able to understand its meaning.
To the impressionists the landscape is the magical moment when Nature is revealed.
To the futurists it is speed, progress, movement, human power.
To kinetic artists it is light and movement.
To geometric abstractionists it is rational landscape, mapping of scientific rules.
To informal artists it is gestural language, physical expression of the contact with matter.
These examples of “landscape art” indicate that the landscape is “EVERYTHING”.
Our mind and body are landscapes, the mapping of our DNA is landscape, and so is the atom, viruses and bacteria in their composition; in short, the origin of life is landscape.
Landscape is our irrational side, and it is also everything we perceive with our senses: our very sensorial perception (olfactory, visual, tactile…); but it is also a projection of the soul and our imagination.
Art itself, as such, is nothing but a landscape of the soul, transferred to a product.
Also “conceptual” art merely produces “landscapes” to express concepts and reveal the soul. Architecture is landscape, not only and not so much because it creates constructions; above all, it is landscape as such, that is to say that aggregate of mathematical rules, lines, forms that create beauty.
Philosophy is the landscape of the mind and the soul.
“Immaterial spaces” is that uncontrollable need for oscillation between physical and mental space that is innate to Man, something extreme yet real and “natural”, to the point of becoming an inevitable part of the life of every human being.
“Immaterial spaces” as search for the fine dividing line between dream and illusion, between imaginary place and real place, a way to fly “high” in order to keep one’s soul free from oppression. And so he who is really imprisoned escapes into fantasy, the madman becomes wise; but where is the borderline between wisdom and folly? Is not folly a kind of amplified fantasy? A dream that has come true, only to the one who wants to prolong it?
Landscape is not just “panorama” of reality, but what we imagine, what we dream…
The human mind may perhaps contain more imaginary than real landscape.
A serene space, surrounded by an aura of transcendence. Silent space, empty as infinite spatiality. A sense of infinity. Spaces charged with meditative tension and transcendence.
The works of Lita Albuquerque, Laddie John Dill and Andy Moses are spaces of absolute infiniteness.
Works that induce more salient reflections on existence. Works immerged in silence, that owe their existence to silence. Silence not as absence of meaning, but as transcendental reflection, moment of meditation.
Space as temporal diaphragm, pause; as “pausylipon” or “pause from pain”. A moment in which art is no longer a way of doing, of acting, but a moment for receiving, also in a mystic sense, not as religious mysticism but rather as reflection on existence. Reception of images from the innermost regions of the I, acts of exploration of the self. Landscapes of the mind.
Unexplored territories of the I that are waiting to be discovered, by venturing on a journey within oneself. These works are among the most significant reflections on contemporary existence. The “who we are”, “where we are going”, made real, concrete through the construction of works charged with material and colour.
The works of the three artists corresponds to three ways to approach the landscape as pictorial and mental fact.
Some of the works of Albuquerque, especially the “red pigment paintings” inevitably evoke the origins of creation: her “blows of artists” in which the natural red pigment is blown onto the canvas by the artist’s breath is nothing but the reproduction of the Biblical theme of the creative “breath” that gave life to everything. And it is also, at the same time, volcanic eruption, the explosion of fire that gave rise to the universe. In another work, her installation “Stellar Axis”, the immediate reference is to the ice age, from which life has also been formed and developed. But this is not all: her installation is an exact reproduction, with the blue spheres lying on the ice, of the stars in the blue firmament of the Antarctic, in the name of a relationship with the whole Universe that is not personal, but belongs to every human being as part of everything.
A Land Artist who has always pursued her goal of protecting Nature as the sole means of human survival, Albuquerque’s relationship with the natural element is immediate, instinctive and very strong. Perhaps her whole life has been dedicated to this relationship, not only in the gigantic installations of the Antarctic or the Giza in Cairo, but also in other works where the research centres on the spatial relationship between centre and periphery as in “gold leaf untitled” where the centripetal element of the excavated sphere in the support, so centralized as to be centripetal to the peripheral forces, gives the idea of an express intention to concentrate pure energy in a central nucleus.
It is no coincidence that the round form contained in a square reinforces this concept by visualizing, in a masterly manner, the idea of concentration of energy within a central nucleus which is, as the case may be, atom or spirit, corporeality, physicality and spirituality. The artist explores this spatial relationship made of geometric/mathematic equilibrium, achieving the aesthetic and emotional effect through a perfect management of the colour and the refraction of the light on the work. The choice of only two geometric elements and of only two colours, one of which is often gold, serves to reinforce the concept of basic relationship between the scientific and the emotional.
The works moreover appear to be flooded with light, due to the refraction of the light on the pigments, which accentuates the visual sensation of concentration of the sight on a central nucleus from where the power and energy is irradiated towards the exterior. This is, in a symbolic key, a perfect reproduction of the event of the creation.
Both Dill and Moses create their works of art with a layering of material: it is the very process adopted by Nature, which creates itself by a stratification of magmatic levels. It suffices to consider eruptions and the layering of the crust of the earth. Dill uses, analogously, concrete and glass in a layering or adhesion, to create a work imbued with movement and colour; a “landscape” made from materials deriving from natural products that have been manipulated by man.
The concrete mixture is reduced to a kind of liquid, it is cast on a wooden support and “guided” by the artist’s hand to assume an “attitude” or a specific form, and only that.
Nothing is left to chance; Dill’s art is only inspired by Pollock’s action painting, but it is distinguished from abstract expressionism due to the absence of the casual character of the gesture. It is, rather, a matter of a “controlled, oriented casualness”. The artist’s position with respect to the support is the same: the latter is placed on the floor and dominated from above; the material is dripped from above, the support is handled with great manual skill, to that the material may place itself exactly in a specific and precise position, decided by the artist.
The pictorial space or field is at first sectioned and organized to assume the specific form that is necessary to produce a certain visual pictorial effect and not another; from a basic geometric arrangement, through a dilution of the fluid matter on the support, the artist arrives at a manipulation of such a kind that it is forced to assume a specific form and not another; a form that must in its turn produce a specific visual effect.
A kind of “dripping” effect found in some works, or one of volcanic lava in movement, is due to an excellent mastery of the concrete in its semi-liquid state, and a highly skilled handling of the support.
Space as temporal diaphragm, pause; as “pausylipon” or “pause from pain”. A moment in which art is no longer a way of doing, of acting, but a moment for receiving, also in a mystic sense, not as religious mysticism but rather as reflection on existence. Reception of images from the innermost regions of the I, acts of exploration of the self. Landscapes of the mind.
Unexplored territories of the I that are waiting to be discovered, by venturing on a journey within oneself. These works are among the most significant reflections on contemporary existence. The “who we are”, “where we are going”, made real, concrete through the construction of works charged with material and colour.
The works of the three artists corresponds to three ways to approach the landscape as pictorial and mental fact.
Some of the works of Albuquerque, especially the “red pigment paintings” inevitably evoke the origins of creation: her “blows of artists” in which the natural red pigment is blown onto the canvas by the artist’s breath is nothing but the reproduction of the Biblical theme of the creative “breath” that gave life to everything. And it is also, at the same time, volcanic eruption, the explosion of fire that gave rise to the universe. In another work, her installation “Stellar Axis”, the immediate reference is to the ice age, from which life has also been formed and developed. But this is not all: her installation is an exact reproduction, with the blue spheres lying on the ice, of the stars in the blue firmament of the Antarctic, in the name of a relationship with the whole Universe that is not personal, but belongs to every human being as part of everything.
A Land Artist who has always pursued her goal of protecting Nature as the sole means of human survival, Albuquerque’s relationship with the natural element is immediate, instinctive and very strong. Perhaps her whole life has been dedicated to this relationship, not only in the gigantic installations of the Antarctic or the Giza in Cairo, but also in other works where the research centres on the spatial relationship between centre and periphery as in “gold leaf untitled” where the centripetal element of the excavated sphere in the support, so centralized as to be centripetal to the peripheral forces, gives the idea of an express intention to concentrate pure energy in a central nucleus.
It is no coincidence that the round form contained in a square reinforces this concept by visualizing, in a masterly manner, the idea of concentration of energy within a central nucleus which is, as the case may be, atom or spirit, corporeality, physicality and spirituality. The artist explores this spatial relationship made of geometric/mathematic equilibrium, achieving the aesthetic and emotional effect through a perfect management of the colour and the refraction of the light on the work. The choice of only two geometric elements and of only two colours, one of which is often gold, serves to reinforce the concept of basic relationship between the scientific and the emotional.
The works moreover appear to be flooded with light, due to the refraction of the light on the pigments, which accentuates the visual sensation of concentration of the sight on a central nucleus from where the power and energy is irradiated towards the exterior. This is, in a symbolic key, a perfect reproduction of the event of the creation.
Both Dill and Moses create their works of art with a layering of material: it is the very process adopted by Nature, which creates itself by a stratification of magmatic levels. It suffices to consider eruptions and the layering of the crust of the earth. Dill uses, analogously, concrete and glass in a layering or adhesion, to create a work imbued with movement and colour; a “landscape” made from materials deriving from natural products that have been manipulated by man.
The concrete mixture is reduced to a kind of liquid, it is cast on a wooden support and “guided” by the artist’s hand to assume an “attitude” or a specific form, and only that.
Nothing is left to chance; Dill’s art is only inspired by Pollock’s action painting, but it is distinguished from abstract expressionism due to the absence of the casual character of the gesture. It is, rather, a matter of a “controlled, oriented casualness”. The artist’s position with respect to the support is the same: the latter is placed on the floor and dominated from above; the material is dripped from above, the support is handled with great manual skill, to that the material may place itself exactly in a specific and precise position, decided by the artist.
The pictorial space or field is at first sectioned and organized to assume the specific form that is necessary to produce a certain visual pictorial effect and not another; from a basic geometric arrangement, through a dilution of the fluid matter on the support, the artist arrives at a manipulation of such a kind that it is forced to assume a specific form and not another; a form that must in its turn produce a specific visual effect.
A kind of “dripping” effect found in some works, or one of volcanic lava in movement, is due to an excellent mastery of the concrete in its semi-liquid state, and a highly skilled handling of the support.