Art Installation – 2019
An ancient Roman church from the 5th century A.D. hosts one of my most evocative solo exhibitions. Wrapped in a veil of theatrical smoke, a large tree broken by the wind and rain rests upon a white sheet.
The shadows that emerge, the smoke, and the sensation of being crushed at any moment by the weight of the tree evoke different emotions during the visit.
In different mythological narratives, men were changed into trees, but here the tree is transformed into a person, in an anthropomorphic allegory, in a symbolic vector able to translate the human revealing a soul that betrays itself through silences, rustles, tears resinous.
Plane willows without weeping regrets, arborescent languages go back to the roots of meaning to get lost in the eternal return of a circular movement, a steady growth inscribed in the fate of a corner of the world.
Each tree is a dowser looking for hidden sources in deep fields, an aerobic machine producing breath atoms, driven by slow, incessant, inexorable metabolic processes. Moved by a blind vital instinct, which always knows how to find the reasons for survival, clinging to the infinite unconscious consolation of metamorphosis.
Enveloping jungle of mangroves hanging from the desire of the sky, like millions of arteries passing through branches waiting to find inspiration, as photosensitive leaves lost waiting for regeneration.
In the installation the artist suspends a desire for vegetal elevation perched in a horizontal cloud caged in a nebula elusive to the duty to develop in an ascending sense guided by a vertical moral thrust.
The vegetal structure suspended horizontally is granted to a counter-nature, a rhizome deployed on a thousand directions eluding a pre-established plan, placing itself in a genealogy enveloped in a field of inconsistent, divergent vectors, a deflagration of the finality intrinsic to nature.
Nature self-reveals itself, unfolds within itself, becomes together ontology and epiphany of itself as the tautology of life. Shamans and seers used trees as a bridge to the kingdom of spirits. Nature is a story that reveals itself within a dynamic destiny of self-poietic forms, always exceeding themselves, already projected towards a next further definition. Impulses coming from within that do not remain closed within the self-referential perimeter, but they establish links and relationships between intertwined forms a game of continuous self-transcendence.
The artist suggests that even below the area of definition and clarity exist forms, measures, relationships subjected to pressure, willing to sudden contaminations, between protrusions and grooves, nested in impossible curves, between inflections and mere traces etched with nervous dissemination .
Thin membranes, concentric rings blend together. Beauty is becoming eccentric, it is coexistence of plans, not succession of imperturbable essences, but juxtaposition of truths oxidized by time. A spiritual echo hidden inside things. Still digging worlds inside worlds, flaying appearances inside the sarcophagus of indelible but delicate memory, like a film tattooed by signs that announce the volatile transport of the secretions of the world.
Collected in the deposit of shadows of the form, in the carryover of the signs of the world, remain alone with the nose for something hidden in the cruel shadow of the undergrowth.
© Alessio Ceruti 2024