Shadow, true mother of all art...

Credit anna-nekrashevich

All my life hunting for my identity, trying to understand it, to make it structured, an engine of conquest, of demanding respect, of self-recognition, without ever truly knowing what it is. Although tenuous, and perpetually in formation and transformation, identity is perceived as something that deserves a certain stability and therefore a certain reassurance of existence, on the part of the "legitimate owner" and others.

It's a kind of profile considered reliable to display in the world, yet the phenomenon that most seems to resemble them is something notoriously elusive: the shadow. In its function, the shadow is proof of the solidity of what exists, which projects it relentlessly, in the presence of light. And by definition if there is light, there is shadow, and vice versa.

A continuous dance between what is consistent and what, in being its reflection, is immaterial, visible only to sight, without thickness, in fact, untouchable. The material dialogues with the immaterial and it is precisely in the latter that the great middle ground opens up where everything is born: doubt, intuition, inspiration, art, a newborn matter.

What is art if not the tangible that is born in the intangible and leads to it again with its emanation of transcendence? Getting lost in the shadows, whether one's own or another's, is not the fruit of an evil destiny but of a true blessing for those who always want to go a little beyond what has already been seen, told, and defined.

It is to remain alert in silence in the dark, and when the shadow appears because a small light has come on, to follow it, simply, in its dark and uncertain passage into an unknown horizon emanating from us or from what they call the world.

Contemporary art in particular seems to have embarked on a path of surrender in the shadows, in its constant attempt to make not so much what is stable and secure, but evanescent, mobile.

As if over the centuries the identity of an artist has gradually acquired awareness that it is in indeterminacy the inexhaustible source of artistic expression. Thus, the new challenge is to make the ineffable and, ultimately, to more honestly address the problem of identity: a longed-for utopian island that isn't there, or perhaps it is. And the path continues.

Miriam Fusconi