Comune di Cagliari Assessorato alla Cultura	Centro comunale d'arte e cultura
Paths of the Spirit by Claudio Cerritelli

By way of the memory of history and the traces of the present, in this exhibition of "paths of the spirit" one has the reconfir-mation of the need to fix that physical bodily character of images that constitutes the most fascinating and all-embracing identity of contemporary art, the condition necessary for the experimental adventure of forms which ranges from the primary act of manipulating matter to the virtual transcription of its visual metamorphoses.

In the suggestive exhibition space of EXMA’ Anna Maria Montaldo has invited six artists from different geographical areas to interpret the concept of spirituality with their works: that particular way of feeling art as the instrument of a more in-depth interior investigation and mystical emotion which permits the artist to rediscover the matrices of his or her own identity, irrespective of cultural origin and sense of affinity.

Ranging from painting to photography, sculpture, the installation, poetic writing and video art, the languages are many and oscillate from the emotional attitude/approach to the conceptual, the evocation of the word and the sonority of colour.

The diverse linguistic techniques express the aspiration to achieve a spiritual condition, understood as the evocation of a mysterious and undefinable space which always places the spectator in that state of doubt of not managing to perceive the totality of the visual event, the transformation of the reference to reality in a poetic synthesis. Moreover, and although taking on different connotations, the concept of spirituality is referable to the common aspiration on the part of artists to sacredness, to that condition in which the body and soul of art are identified in the search for the ‘elsewhere’, in the overcoming of materialistic restrictions and ties, in the expectation of grasping the fundamentals of the world in a sole image and in the essence of a form which contains all possible forms.

The organization of the exhibition space, luminous and freed from whatever invasive element, permits reading the experiences of the individual artists as a sum total of separated places that undergo attraction due to the reciprocal magnetisms which do not regard style, form or technique as they do the intensity of the creative approach being faced by the role of art.

If one can talk about spiritualism in the case of artists who are as different as Amore, Casu, Contini, Hiroshe, Lindsay and Nazzari then one must do this by referring to the common vision of art as being the interrogation of the enigma of form, the exploration of the ineffable nature of its elements which no matter how much they are analytically investigated elude comprehension, always placing themselves on the plane of revelation, of an unforeseeable visibility.

The figure of the artist would not have sense were it to avoid placing itself before the mystery of matter, before the power and force of the image understood as the epiphany of sight, the perception of what one does not know and the unveiling of that hidden part which permits crossing the threshold of sensitivity.

The ethical and aesthetic attitude/approach on the part of these artists unfolds by way of the will to pass from the individual dominion of the matter to its cosmic energy, transforming the subjective reasons of its spiritual path into a project of a collective nature.

The relationship with the universal values of nature, for example, is one of the fields which the ‘stories’ of these artists share, who from the archaic image of Sardinia have made a founding motif of their imaginary: be this for the person born in this land of extraordinary primordial spirit, for the person who has decided to live here or for the person who has simply visited the Island, fascinated by its light that becomes a mystical guide for life.

The tersely sharp and passionate art by Antonio Amore looks to the tragic faces of this land. The technological images elaborated by Stefano Casu refer to the changing colours of the water. The pictorial constructions by Aldo Contini connect to the iconologies of Sardinian artistic civilization. The spaces of the entire world, photographed by Satoshi Hiroshe, bear confrontation with the skies of Sardinia. Arturo Lindsay draws upon the anthropological materials of the Island for his alchemical installations. And Wanda Nazzari ‘converses’ with the primordial signs of the universe in addressing her magical forms to the light vibrations of the air.

The "paths of the spirit" not only aim at sublimating the relationship with nature but also at evidencing the beauty of the artifice intended as production: the fact that from the combination of materials – and also the poorest of these – one can create an image that awakens the senses of the unconscious, breaching inaccessible thresholds.

The installations present themselves as spiritual traces of a creative project which ‘breathes’ by way of the physical character of the matter, due to the go-between of a perception that exacts a confrontation with the pulsion of the colour and the tactile sensation of the forms in which the ‘weight’ of the light envelops the images, generating visions born from actually lived life. These traces can be suggested everywhere with neither order nor arrangement of space and time by way of language bound to distant – and not to say opposed – situations, the one to the other.

They can translate themselves in the objects taken from the agricultural world (as in Antonio Amore’s yolks), in the relentless flux of video-writing (those technological natures by Francesco Casu), in the refined retablos of Catalan origin (the refined icons by Aldo Contini), in ancestral stories-cum-histories and in the anthropological sustenance of objects (see the personifications by Arturo Lindsay), in the mirage of boundless horizons (the clouds photographed by Satoshi Hiroshe) and in the vibrations of the aerial and solid state of the form (as in the case of the transparencies by Wanda Nazzari).

These modalities of approach are the variegated alphabet of the exhibition, the sense of which lies in the ‘staging’ of differences, in the perceptive risk let loose by the fact that in mixing or combining different "humours" – ranging from the return to manual skill to the flight into technology – it is possible to lose sight of the overall meaning of the operation. In short: of that enchantment of the sacred.

This conception regards the artist’s ‘space of salvation’ which in today’s age of simulated simulation attempts to reconquer and reclaim its integrity by way of an art practice that knows how to be poetic thought, a state of enchantment (a spell) and the effort to humanize mankind in order to lead it back again to the pleasure of life, to the value of knowledge and awareness. To the relationship with other people.

Only the possibility of rethinking the function of the artist in relation to the project of collective existence allows one to see art as an instrument by means of which to approach so-called transcendence. And yet what is "transcendence" in art if not its very own tendency towards the perception of the invisible, awareness and knowledge of the inexpressible, the transformation of matter in a place of the evincing and manifestation of the original form?

Is it not perhaps the search for origin that real process of sacredness? Is it not – perhaps – an intrinsic quality of art to be spiritual, projected towards an intersubjective and therefore universal dialogue, capable of transmitting from person to person, capable of producing itself from itself by way of continuous revelations?

Every artistic path or course that declares itself under the name of spirituality in fact risks evoking that which is already within its creative foundations: it risks indicating a process "which becomes". It is never static. It creates and destroys without calculation and with a desire to annul itself within its own creative, total vision.

The very idea of a "spirit" in contrast to a "body" does not hold up with regards to art. Rather, art lives these terms in their profound coincidence, as the practice of the freedom that takes action within the synthesis of opposites, in the overturning and upsetting of all of the conventions that separate thinking from doing.

The sense of spirituality which contemporary artists support lies in the extension of the limits/limitations of the eye, in the desire to perceive new sensations of space and time, in entrusting oneself to the generative force of pure emotions, of exalting existence as concatenations of images that privilege the creation of new creative states, directly open to the search for the ‘beyond’, unavoidable on the part of the condition of existence.

It is for these reasons that one can speak about a reawakening of spirituality without the fear of plummeting into the rhetoric of the religious and the sacred as obsolete categories, riveted to liturgical iconographies which are totally insufficient concerning a discussion that aims at individuating the intensity of being and not the quantification of religious themes. In being a category that is increasingly more extraneous to the codification of Christian experience, the concept of spirituality has in the past years accompanied a conspicuous number of contemporary art exhibitions, although not without certain ambiguities in understanding or interpreting the term (and here, furthermore, one is aware not only of its use but also of the abuse of the term).

In order to avoid generalizations and theoretical discourses that are perhaps too pretentious, I think it is useful to verify this hypothesis within the experience of the individual artists. A condition, in fact, that is necessary in order to ‘capture’ the different spirit which animates the only possible destiny for art: that is, the life of forms.

For the artist this means ‘being there’, it means continuing to concentrate on his/her own unnerving creative folly – in no way admitted or corroborated by the organized world that literally surrounds the same artist. This willpower to free oneself from large-scale communication is the measure of a spiritual dominion of the world which allows nurturing that great ambition of the creative act: that accomplishment of being inflexible vis-à-vis whatever other language, untranslatable by other means of communication.

This final consideration does not exempt us from expressing a particular mention for the work of photographic documentation carried out by Stefano Grassi and to whom we owe the photos of this catalogue, the ‘reading’ for the installation of the exhibition, the details, points of view, the in-depth study, the objectivity and the overall measures taken. In short, another visual writing that exalts the often concealed internal aspects which each installation embodies by way of the presence of all the elements matured in them, ranging from their ideation to their physical presence.

To know how to reveal their meaning by way of the sensitivity of the photographic eye is what Grassi has managed to achieve, also in virtue of his autonomous research regarding the possibilities of ‘journeying’ through the soul of the forms, not only detecting and capturing their imperceptible movements but also the ones, those movements, which ambiguously lie concealed in the image.

This is a result which is anything but irrelevant for a catalogue that documents the unrepeatable presence of installations which are ‘tied’ to a place and to specific exhibition spaces. Consequently, we have an instrument of registration, a ‘recording’ of what memory alone is unable to anchor with that same intensity which while it explores the irrevocable vision of the work also interprets its differences.

Claudio Cerritelli