Events/Openings

Toward a holistic art

Donato Piccolo is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation, both in Italy and on the international scene. He collaborates since several years with Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin, a unique space dedicated to the artistic exploration of sound and physical processes associated to it.
In this very peculiar context, where art, science and philosophy are conceived of in an inseparable way, the artist unveils to us his latest new works. (It is in this very special context where art, science and philosophy are considered so inseparable that the artist unveils to us all his latest new works)

Mist, clouds, vapor, whirlwinds constitute some on the visual signatures of the artist, whose personality is reminiscent of the ancient figure of Empedocles, at the same time poet, engineer, philosopher and thaumaturge; a hero, who according to the legend was driven to disappear in the gloomy clouds of Etna by his quest for an ultimate truth.
Indeed a number of sculptures / installations by the artist seem to invite us to penetrate with our sight at the heart of a thick fog, in view of an experience at once spellbinding and silent: a kind of art that seeks, according to him, not to replicate a potentially lethal phenomenon, but to transmute a "physical process" into a "mental state."

The cloud is the constant figure starting from which everything appears, happens, and then disappears again. It is the cradle of all things. It is also the veil that envelops physical phenomena and hides from our eyes their origin as their ultimate foundation.

Here, our mind and senses adjust gradually to the diapason of the bubbling and turbulence of the substance until they resonate with it.
In order to induce such a peculiar resonance phenomenon , most of the artist's works combine two complementary and inseparable aspects: they are at the same time sculptures and machines, forms and processes. According to Donato Piccolo, this hybrid character constitutes the actual nature of «holistic art»: an art whose essential function is to explore "the incomprehensible mystery of the visible world".

This exhibition is dedicated to Prof. Alfonso Sutera, a recently deceased Italian physicist and meteorologist who was friends with the artist. It is as if Donato Piccolo chose to honor his memory by generating phenomena that he had spent his life observing and describing.

A star fluttering under a glass bell; eggs in the process of incubating; a man-machine (whose physiognomy resembles that of a young Da Vinci) frantically drawing; a transparent sphere decomposing the noise surrounding a complex architecture of iridescent bubbles; collages-assemblages of images; words and luminous graphics; cloudy, large-sized landscapes...

It is possible to classify the works outlined above in two distinct and complementary categories: there are those that detect and record a signal and those that emit one. The exhibition space, therefore, is put under tension as an energy circuit in which each piece plays a specific role: relay , resistor, capacitor, amplifier ... Or else: incubator, tomb, celestial observatory ...
By multiplying approaches, viewpoints as well as techniques (painting, collage, sculpture, installation) Donato Piccolo draws the evolutionary map of a dynamic landscape. Here, the lines and shapes are not used to outline contours but rather to comprehend trajectories, to confine explosions that are just as well blossomings. At any moment we follow the trace of a fluttering butterfly, the jerky movement of a hand, the Brownian motion of particles in suspension, the progressive fragmentation of a soap bubble or the slow waving of smoke rings.

As we evoke the various processes at work—condensation, distillation, sublimation...—we can not avoid imagining that perhaps these clouds are those that emerge from the athanor (the cosmic furnace of alchemists), that which not only transforms the matter and the conception that we have it, but also our spirit and the vision we have of ourselves.

David Rosenberg
March 2014