geniuslooci

Cultivating Images

I think art can be lived as a biological event, a breath that happens here and now, in a garden, in a square, or in the darkness of a temple. It certainly happens outside display cases and far from the dehumidified silence of museums. Images, for me, are living organisms: it is not enough to observe them, they have to be inhabited.

So I move through art history to strip away labels, break through categories, and try to return the senses to their original right: to be unsettled by the unease of a putto by Donatello, by the awkward dance of a satyr, or by the magnetic smile of an Etruscan god. These are forces that appear in matter and in the landscape because they first of all inhabit us. And I believe they can still speak to us, if we are willing to remain in their company.

I choose to listen to what usually stays in the background. I prefer waiting and dwelling to the compulsive need of tourist consumption that wants to understand everything immediately.

Beauty as a form of presence and resistance: a way of being in the world that has to do with growth, like that of a plant.

A climbing beauty, the only answer to the anesthesia of our time.