See the invisible. The art of Alessandra Maxร culi

Artists like Maxร culi remind us that beauty and truth are closely related: truth, in Greek ฮฌฮปฮฎฮธฮตฮนฮฑ, is literally "non-forgetfulness", and beauty is what allows man to remember what he has forgotten, to regain possession of that treasure that lies hidden in everyone's heart, that "fund of omniscience" of which the Buddhist texts speak. Art then becomes a bridge reaching out to the Infinite, a fissure that allows you to escape from the prison of space and time, and thus to escape becoming and death.

di Flavio Ferraro

If we reflect on the era in which it was born informal art, we realize that it develops roughly in the same years in which currents of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism are affirmed, which place the dissolution of the subject at the center of their reflection. If the form is not, as in the current meaning of the term, the external or visible aspect of a thing, but it is the model or the paradigm of what is manifested (and therefore is anterior to the thing manifested, just like the soul is anterior to the body), it is easy to understand what an art that is deliberately formless represents from a metaphysical point of view. What we consider today abstract art it has nothing in common with the abstraction of traditional art, which referred to ideas in the Platonic meaning of the term, but it is simply an art from which all meaning has been removed, and which can only express its own disintegration.

Fortunately, there are rare exceptions, and even today it is possible to find artists for whom abstraction is not simply the disappearance of the figure, but the attempt to go back from the particular to the universal, grasping the essential in the authentic sense of the term; but it can be said that thecontemporary art it is very often literally insignificant, because it has chosen to sever every link with what is the principle of every manifestation. We are besieged by signs, but their incessant proliferation hides the fact that they no longer have any meaning, and when things lose their meaning they die.

If we are allowed to use an image that is only apparently paradoxical, it is as if the postmodern individual looks so as not to see: in order not to see, ultimately, that nothing that surrounds him and that the society of the simulacrum - where simulation takes the place reality until it becomes more real than what it imitates - it tries in every way to hide by filling the space with unrelated signs, a space that becomes so saturated with images that it prevents vision, a sort of opaque background, a black hole in which bodies and objects collapse.

Well, among the artists who oppose this degeneration of the image (and vision), we can certainly count Alessandra Maxร culi, an Italo-Greek artist whose multifaceted activity ranges through oil painting, drawing and engraving, with a particular predilection for ancient techniques - and nowadays rather neglected - such as woodcut. "The time and space of my works is indefinite, nebulous and primordial", says Maxร culi. And primordial seems to us an adjective that well represents his art, in which the boundary between figure and abstraction is always thin and blurred, and where the infinite shades of black give life to extremely rigorous and essential visions, and at the same time vivid and iridescent in the their passing of lights and shadows.

They are mesmeric works, sometimes alienating, where signs, symbols and figures seem to emerge from unfathomable depths, and where what the eye is able to grasp and decipher has never anything satisfying and consoling, but it seems a sort of viaticum for the invisible, an invitation to a journey to archetypal and numinous realms, in the awareness that the image at which the artist aims cannot be seen in the paper, in the canvas or in the colors, precisely because it was first conceived through what, strictly speaking, can be defined as a contemplative act even before than sensory, and only later was it imitated in a visible form.

It is as if the artist were trying, and we with her, to go back - through what apparently is his opposite, that is black - to that white, that non-color from which all colors and their infinite shades derive. , and of which they are nothing more than the differentiations. Black and white, light and darkness, visible and invisible alternate, collide and interpenetrate through an intense and vibrant sign, but this game of reverberations animated by a tight rhythm and of absolute precision, has nothing dualistic or Manichean at all, but rather tends to bring these two principles - apparently opposite, but in reality complementary - back to the unity from which they derive .

The artist's operation then loses any merely subjective and contingent character, and becomes a hieratic act, a rite capable of transmuting the visible, letting us see its unmanifested principle.: the image thus becomes a manifestation of the invisible, a symbol of a beyond to which one can only allude. Maxร culi, traditional artist in the meaning that Coomaraswamy gave to this expression, has not forgotten what for Plato - and for the Philosophia Perennis in general - it is the purpose of art: remind us of the eternal truths, those truths that the soul "saw" before its fall into the world of multiplicity and which now, clothed in a body, she can no longer remember.

Artists like Maxร culi remind us that beauty and truth are closely related: truth, in Greek ฮฌฮปฮฎฮธฮตฮนฮฑ, is literally "non-forgetfulness", and beauty is what allows man to remember what he has forgotten, to regain possession of that treasure that lies hidden in everyone's heart, that "fund of omniscience" of which the Buddhist texts speak. Art then becomes a bridge reaching out to the Infinite, a fissure that allows you to escape from the prison of space and time, and thus to escape becoming and death.

"He who does not imagine sharper and better forms than can be seen by this deadly mortal eye, does not imagine at all," he says William Blake, an artist much loved by Maxร culi; it is with the eye of the heart, as the Sufi masters teach, that the essential realities are seen, that immortal eye that alone is able to grasp that intangible, colorless and invisible truth, which neither words nor images will ever be able to express completely. If you want to see, you have to close your eyes: Alessandra Maxร culi, fervent reader of metaphysical and wisdom texts, has understood this well, and also from here derives the profound charm that her works, so perturbing and unknown, emanate.

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