Layers. Poetic eco-phobia

The inevitable and the perverse

In the perception of a complex, fragmented reality, in which velocity replaces reflection, emerges a layering, an impermanent process that generates (leads to the conception of) several layers of significance. The layer represents the perception adjusting (modulating itself) around and within the thought: it requires multiple levels of interpretation and infinite perspectives and connections.

Our contemporaneity, in fact, is characterized by a hyper-connection, produced by a hyper-layering. Political, economic, aesthetic, cultural, formal and informal, natural or artificial, organic and inorganic, diachronic or syncretic, the layering is the conceptual base of the reality’s entire organization.

The exhibition Layers. Poetic eco-phobia aims to analyse the structure of this paradigm and its implications in association between artists of different cultural matrices. A meta-cultural, meta-temporal and, in addition, meta-historical itinerary where atavistic references and contrasting poetics are associated in the common objective of showing the dense meaning conveyed by the artworks. It resembles the mechanism on which is based the deep perversion of the artistic practice: reveal these hidden perspectives; desecrate what has been abused; create instead of producing. The politics of form gives way to the critique of control and power in a reality increasingly permeable and permeated with hybrid and heterogeneous beings, made in different realities. Its nature is inherently temporary, fleeting, regarding the order to which things belong. Art transcends, does not elevate, and it develops the secular and profane action of piercing the veil of our volatile beliefs. Every artists involved in this project not only address the layer in the medium of expression, but also in the very conception of their own poetics.

Macoto Murayama transforms reality through the following processes: the observation with microscope and the dissecting of plants, organic beings. From these processes, he develops his own artistic practice. He recreates these elements through his 3D graphics, expressing the fullest potential of human action.

His whole conception of the artwork shows deeply complementary matrices: science and art, intellect and experience. In his two artworks on display the sinuous forms of these flowers are a plastic metaphor of a seductive archetype: two curved bodies meet, in a delicate dance during which time and space lose their relevance. Explicitly erotic, subtly existential, they are based on several layers of significance, which merge and come together in the narrative.

The entire work of Fabio Roncato is a reflection on sculpture, intended as a necessary practice of the emergence of objective truth opposed to an increasingly rampant subjective verisimilitude.

His works manifest a liquid conception of matter, in which processes of organic growth emerge taking on the structure of Momentum: a movement in space and time. In Landscape, rugged shapes refer to the archetypal image of a bird's-eye view of water’s ripples or mountain peaks. The artist takes up the processes of layering of messages to insist on the transformation of the work from a visual element to an object that conveys meaning into form.

Katharina Veerkamp, in her series Invasive Aliens, reports the condition of a type of plant that occupies, dominates, shapes and transforms the landscape in which it’s inserted. An alien species that, however, does not violate the context in which it’s inserted but tries to inhabit places previously occupied by others. Thanks to the iridescent paint and the use of translucent panels, these works appear monochrome from the front, while observing them from the side, the textures and shapes of this free and daring nature emerge. The sculptures, however, insist on the conception of gesture as a pervasive practice, in which the different levels of reading are transparent, flattening the difference and their boundaries. Mimicry and semblance are a metaphor for the narcissism of the individual, who seeks only himself outside of himself.

The primordial order, the chaotic vortex of an frozen, crystallized time. Dingyue (Luna) Fan creates forms that are lost in the flow of objects and tension within dreamlike landscapes, which are essentially related to memory. In the cycle à rebour (upstream) she relates the perspectives of bodies, creatures and backgrounds through a transfigurative approach in which she captures the fluidity of the female subconscious in a rhythm marked by a fragile succession of snapshots and moments. A realist matrix hybridizes in a profound abstract vocation, the result of an aesthetic layering.

The fluidity of Sophia Pauley’s practice alternates painting, drawing and sculptural installations, involving a deep sense of nostalgia and emotion. Her studio production, based on a repetitive and obsessive process, reflects the immersion of the mind in the creative act. His work includes the exploration of ever-changing materials, in which he researches and finds other ways beyond the traditional pictorial models. The works that try to emerge in the space of the wall and floor creating depth. His work reflects the contradictions of the concept of flow: a careful and precise analysis of adrenaline, attention and control.

Building, dwelling, thinking, with this essay, in 1951, Martin Heidegger introduces the thought of a radically different conception of space. Living gives meaning to building, and in their tension enters thinking: existential place, metaphor of being-in-space. A consequential concatenation in which to build presupposes living, which presupposes thinking, conceiving the individual as an agent part of the space he occupies. Heidegger’s reflection, however, is not limited to a new perspective on space, but greatly contributes to a very precise vision of time: building needs to build on something, with something, for something; living implies the population of new places, already present, previously occupied or free; thinking is based, by its nature, on a long and substantial ancestral heritage, the origin of the structures of thought (the Kantian a priori).

And it is here that the paradigm establishes itself, intended as a space for endless research on the deep origins of the reality’s thought, of the Antropocene: the necessary reconception and remodulation of the role of the human being that is no longer a vertical hierarchy but a horizontal coexistence. The ecological dimension is just one of the fragments that make up this articulated system of theories. In our contemporaneity, in fact, we daily express a structured sensitivity for the future, which appears around us as an infinite constellation that composes, in the reflection of Vilém Flusser, a "universe of dots" in which it hovers imperceptible. Ecology would seem to be, following the lines of Flusser in the interpretation of Byung-Chul Han, a certain principle to give back to the individual his own space and role in the future. The risk is making a utopia of this perspective. Echo, in fact, does not necessarily imply an approach scientifically based on the change of a given environment, but deepens the change of that environment over time. A transformation that is, first of all, of a cultural matrix. Even more dormant, perhaps neglected, the utopia of eco-philia and ecology seems to give way to the atopy of eco-phobia: the tremendous and solipsistic terror, the child of our inadequacy that our efforts are deeply vain. The eco-phobic atopy manifests itself in the lack of possibility of recognition, of the individual, inside the place he lives - alien to the same world in which he actively participates. The political and poetic regime of eco-philia constitutes the eco-political layer, which in the process, basically, changes into eco-phobic layering. In artistic practice, this is expressed with the conception of immediate images that allow the perception of the transformative nature of reality and its mutability.

An exhibition in which the inevitable change in the human perspective, too human, is combined with the perversion of the claim, typical of artistic representation, to reveal other worlds, to deepen the structure of existence, to think. Eco-philia and eco-phobia are two strictly complementary dimensions in which transience, the result of a radical presentism, clashes with the permanence of the very nature of the gesture of reflection. A conception, the one of thought, neglected and degraded in speculation and idealism.

Valeria Schäfer

Matteo Scabeni