"THE WHITE BAT" (IL PIPISTRELLO BIANCO)
tel.fax: +39. 051. 221308 e-mail:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mario Airò
Galleria de'Foscherari
Via Castiglione 2B - 40124 Bologna
tel.fax: +39. 051. 221308 e-mail:
OCTOBER 5 > DECEMBER 7 , 2019
The exhibition title alludes to a book in which the author, aided by elderly and younger dongba (leaders of rituals, shamans), has attempted to translate a religious manuscript from the Nakhi tradition, written in the last pictographic language to have survived into our time. It is truly fascinating to read: the story summons up powerful images, and the mythical figures that people it are a far cry from those of European culture, embodying spiritual and existential impulses that emerged from a context completely unlike our own Mediterranean soup, in a land at the foot of the towering Himalayas.
I am sorry to say that the works on view do not draw on this rich universe of symbols, nor do they try to illustrate it; they merely dream of a similar harmony, which they try to bring into tune with the surrounding space and with our culture, which doesn't seem to have entered a decline so much as a spiraling plunge.
The guiding images that led me to what you will see in the exhibition were, aside from the Nakhi pictograms, those of a documentary showing Mount Kailash―one of the most extraordinary sights I have ever encountered, the kind that makes one fully grasp the apotropaic power that images hold for our species (it is no coincidence that three great religions consider it to be the meeting point of energies that flow between earth and sky, human and divine). And, too, the absorption spectra of the chemical elements, especially the intervals between their frequencies, which are true harmonies of light.
What else? I probably ought to leave it at that: from here on in, we are entering another realm, one where only images and forms can speak to each other.
And we must follow them and watch how they move, how they interconnect, call out to each other over and over, along lines of affinity and empathy; observe how they chew over and chew up the mother tongue, the language that will give them semblance form meaning and symbolic status, which will give them an guise and grant the incredible power of resonance that will reverberate to make our drained synapses dance.
Luckily, these works remain elusive, proudly and disdainfully hermetic, impatient with all nagging requests for explanation.
But in the end the content doesn't really matter, or rather, is sensory, the kind of sensory impression that immediately becomes an idea: no sooner encountered than it lifts you, like a sudden thermal, in a spiral to the sky.
Mario Airò
I am sorry to say that the works on view do not draw on this rich universe of symbols, nor do they try to illustrate it; they merely dream of a similar harmony, which they try to bring into tune with the surrounding space and with our culture, which doesn't seem to have entered a decline so much as a spiraling plunge.
The guiding images that led me to what you will see in the exhibition were, aside from the Nakhi pictograms, those of a documentary showing Mount Kailash―one of the most extraordinary sights I have ever encountered, the kind that makes one fully grasp the apotropaic power that images hold for our species (it is no coincidence that three great religions consider it to be the meeting point of energies that flow between earth and sky, human and divine). And, too, the absorption spectra of the chemical elements, especially the intervals between their frequencies, which are true harmonies of light.
What else? I probably ought to leave it at that: from here on in, we are entering another realm, one where only images and forms can speak to each other.
And we must follow them and watch how they move, how they interconnect, call out to each other over and over, along lines of affinity and empathy; observe how they chew over and chew up the mother tongue, the language that will give them semblance form meaning and symbolic status, which will give them an guise and grant the incredible power of resonance that will reverberate to make our drained synapses dance.
Luckily, these works remain elusive, proudly and disdainfully hermetic, impatient with all nagging requests for explanation.
But in the end the content doesn't really matter, or rather, is sensory, the kind of sensory impression that immediately becomes an idea: no sooner encountered than it lifts you, like a sudden thermal, in a spiral to the sky.
Mario Airò
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Mario Airò |
Opening :
SATURDAY OCTOBER 5 AT 6 PM
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Gallery hours:
Monday-Saturday 10:00 to 12:30 / 15:30 to 19:30
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