Comune di Cagliari Assessorato alla Cultura	Centro comunale d'arte e cultura
Wanda Nazzari "The principle of doubt"
"The principle of doubt" (2000) wood, bronze, acrylic and gold

In the form of the door placed in the centre of the room there is "the principle of doubt" to which Wanda Nazzari entrusts her restlessness and anxiety of an artist searching for light, the essence of the work, the origin and destiny of its visibility.

The characteristic of this installation lies in the fact that it offers itself as the threshold of the eye which lets itself be attracted by the materials, inside the empty spaces and the interstices where light and shade render perception mysterious. The public explores this sumptuous and superb door, moving around its sublime body which both lies in space and contains spaces that rise upwards to a height which it is difficult to sustain.

In order to conceive this form of ascension and ecstasy the artist was inspired by the vestments of the priests used during the religious holidays and paraded in the squares. She started out from the chromatic preciosity of the "piviale" (cope) that transfigures the weight of the body in a spiritual dimension, towards the elevation of matter.

At the beginning the work presents a wooden structure of three elements only just ajar and painted with two layers of colour, violet and white, in such a way as to suggest flashes of light that are emanated all around, creating the state of expectation for the "clothing" – and "investiture" – of the form. Nazzari then wraps the structure of the door with a film of gold-coloured bronze with traces of violet acrylic painted in such a way that one glimpses the pigment and only shows the most impalpable effect of the matter.

With this work of sensitization of the surface the artist gives the place of the threshold that sense of suspension and lightness which permits it to be a spiritual, sacred icon: in other words, an absolute form which is detached from conventional perception in order to become a metaphor of doubt, of a cognitive state that gradually grows as the spectator observes the work, lives it and possesses it in its hidden paths.

The light gathers between film and film, penetrating everywhere, causing the welling up of minimum vibrations that spread like tenuous underlying flashes, subjected to the presence of the traces of colour which hold and give back the luminous flux to the eye.

To imagine a door physically erected before one’s eyes means crossing the threshold of thought, first of all, taking oneself to that point where reality and imagination act together in order to create a sole and unique state of ecstasy. This is an interior, spiritual space which takes on the physical quality of transparencies as the essential factor for the visibility of the work, made up of implosions and energies that tend to shift from one zone to another and to dislocate the vibrations from the bottom upwards without ever stopping at one point.

Principle of doubt is an invitation to enter oneself, to break the inertia of thought, to more profoundly scrutinize the chaos within us, the madness which ‘grazes’ us, the truth that emblematically passes through the fissure of the threshold and is dispersed in the emptiness.

The eye of the spectator follows this real and virtual line which moves upwards, indicating an elevated distance towards which flow those vibrations tied to the fulls and the empties, unmeasurable luminosity that can only be intuited in its unfolding.

The light is not only a source that comes from the outside and filters into the heart of the work. It is above all the very way by which the image gives itself form, it is the ‘becoming place’ of the form by way of the lightness of the films that wrap the space and protect it from the rest, like a dwelling that contains the origin of being.

In this sense the tension which Nazzari puts into this magical installation lies in the search for totality, the symbolic form as entire organism, to be observed in its relationship with the environment in that it extends beyond its own limits.

In this aspiration to transform the multiplicity of events into a unitary place one can grasp the sentiment of fullness and, at one and the same time, of lightness, which is the original characteristic of the artist’s research work, the actual point of arrival of her concept of space.

Wanda Nazzari

Wanda Nazzari completed her artistic and cultural formation in Cagliari where she both lives and works. Following an abstract poetic ‘suspended’ between sign and colour, towards the close of the 1980’s she orientated her research work within an increasingly more definite spatial dimension, a path that was to lead her to the tridimensional works – the "Polyptychs" – and to the large installation interventions of the 1990’s. She has held numerous one-woman exhibitions and taken part in innumerable group exhibitions in both Italy and abroad. In 1995 she was appointed artistic director and curator of the Centro Culturale Man Ray, a multipurpose exhibition space dedicated to contemporary experimentation and for which she has organized numerous national and international exhibitions. She has also actively worked as a scenographer and artistic consultant in the fields of advertising and theatrical productions.

Principal one-man exhibition and installations

1980	Wanda Nazzari, personale, galleria La Bacheca, Cagliari
1982	"Tra segno e colore luce", personale, galleria La Bacheca, Cagliari
1985	Wanda Nazzari, ’84-’85, personale, galleria La Bacheca, Cagliari
1987	Wanda Nazzari Incisioni, personale, Stamperia L’aquilone, Cagliari
1987	"The totemic genesis", installazione, Sa Itria, Gavoi
1992	Wanda Nazzari, Legni, tele, personale, galleria La Bacheca, Cagliari
1992	"Ritmi azzurri", installazione, Cagliari
1992	"Penelope ’92", installazione per "Arte di passaggio", Cagliari
1993	"Mystica", installazione, Cripta di S.Domenico, Cagliari
1993	"A Sarajevo ancora", installazione, galleria Capidepoche, Cagliari
1994	"Pagine", personale, galleria La Bacheca, Cagliari
1996	"Ali", installazione, Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari
1996	"Quando sull’orizzonte ferito", installazione, Cagliari
1997	Wanda Nazzari, Pittura e scultura, personale, Centro Kairos, Sassari
1997	"Silenzi", personale, Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari
1998	"Spazi d’emozione", installazione, Palazzo Viceregio, Cagliari
1998	"Riconciliazione", installazione, Cittadella dei Musei, Cagliari
1998	"Ai margini del viola", personale, Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari.
1999	"Di luoghi e di tempo", personale Casa Olla, Quartu S. Elena.
1999	"Piviale", installazione per "Spazi udibili", Piazza Indipendenza Cagliari.
1999	"Le voci illese", Installazione per "Stanze", Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari.
2000	"Opposte pulsioni", personale per la Rassegna "Attraversamenti" Casa Olla Quartu.

Principal group exhibition

1980	Regionali Arti Figurative, Cagliari
1980	Biennale artisti sardi, Villa Gran Bretagna, Como
1982	"Istanze contemporanee", Chironi ’88, Nuoro
1983	"Exhibition of italian print-marker"s, Polytechnic Gallery, Leeds (Gran Bretagna).
1984	Artisti sardi, Milano
1987	"IV Art Co-opera International Art Slaves", Sa Itria, Gavoi
1988	"Cagliari ’88 l’Attualità della ricerca", Villa Satta, Cagliari
1988	"Segni d’Autore in Sardegna", Galleria Comunale, Cagliari
1989	Inciso da Cagliari, Biblioteca Comunale Palo del Colle, Bari
1990	"Presenze nell’Arte in Sardegna", Fiera Campionaria, Cagliari
1991	"Abstracta ’91", Biblioteca Comunale, Villamar
1993	Collettiva maestri incisori, Convento degli Scolopi, Isili
1994	"Diritti e rovesci", mostra internazionale per Amnesty International, Bagno a Ripoli, Firenze
1995	"Pietra, legno, terra", Casa Deriu, Bosa-Isola, Cagliari
1995	"Nascono farfalle morte", Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari
1996	"Il pianto degli Angeli", Altamura, Cagliari
1996	"Hedendoagse Grafiek", Gent, Belgio
1996	"Per Naitza", Cagliari, S.Sperate, Isili, Sinnai
1997	"Blu profondo", Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari
1998	"La linea rende visibile", Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari
1998	"Arte Evento e Creazione", Chiesa S.Andrea, Sassari
1998	"Sguardi sulla ricerca", XI Ed. Time in Jazz, Berchidda.