EXHIBITION
"The contemporaneity of the sacred"
Curatela
Why this exhibition?
Why 15 Russian icons interpreted by 15 contemporary artists, from various countries and different cultures? In the contemporary world do we need to rediscover the value of the sacred and why use icons?
The sacred is not the emanation of a religion, it is one of its possible territories. The sacred concerns the relationship with what is outside of us. The sacred alone does not exist. It is a medium between us and the unknown world of our perceptions and emotions. A temple, a relic, but also a photo of the loved and lost person, a work of art, the place of the first meeting or a promise are sacred. The concreteness of the sacred comes to us with an encroachment, with the unspeakable, with a concrete infinity.
The sacred educates us: to respect, to devotion, to humility. He educates us to overcome the ego, which is the origin of the decadence of societies.
Perhaps this is why the sacred has lost because it needs a social grammar that considers a space, a painting, or a promise to be wonderful, because they are the current opportunity to feel our shortcomings in contact with what is greater than us. When did eternity disappear, replaced by an eternal present? When the ego has lost the humility of its boundaries and the immeasurable is only an uncounted measure, the sacred does not need to exist. Without the eternal, the infinity we have not only lost the sacred, but also the care which obliges us to be capable of it. In the history of art, and not only, in the periods of nefarious moments for the humanity we have witnessed a re-evaluation of the sacred. In 1904, with the restoration of Rublev's Trinity, we witnessed a rediscovery of the importance of the icon. In 1911 Henri Matisse defined them as the "best heritage" of medieval art.
Even Kandinsky's art, as Gilbert Dagron wrote, can be defined as abstract as it "rejects the notions of nature and object in favor of another visibility" and "has a sure kinship with the type of iconic representation that orthodoxy has consecrated in the religious sphere, but which the modern artist differentiates for purposes. ”We know that Andy Warhol uses the Russian icon in his works, imitating its aesthetic form and the method of repetition and the adoption of the multiple. Finally Rothko, secularly, devoted his entire life to contemplating that infinite and ideal space, which at times manifests itself as a pure and soothing sky, at other times it seems to explode in flashes of mystical light. Not surprisingly, his painting was defined by the critic Harold Rosenberg as "the theological side of Abstract Expressionism". Rothko never wanted to limit the search for him, first of all human, existential, to the exclusive sphere of the sacred.
However, his paintings appear to us as a theophany, the appearance of the "divine" by means of light and color. And it was he who confirmed it when he asserted that his canvases "destroy illusion and reveal the truth." The perceptual values of his paintings are not only aimed at creating a new aesthetic but want to obtain emotional and unconscious emotions.
There is no doubt that today we are in great need of the sacred.
Pietro Franesi
International artistic curator
