A permanent installation by Enrico Magnani. Art and science at the Gran Sasso National Laboratories (Assergi, L’Aquila) with “Quintessence”, a permanent installation created within the Laboratories themselves by Enrico Magnani, a visual artist with a past as a scientific researcher, who aims to develop and promote the interaction between the world of science and the world of art for a new vision and understanding of the Universe.
The artist, who has exhibited his works in numerous museums, foundations, private galleries and institutions both in the United States and in Europe, including CERN in Geneva, intends to facilitate, through artistic practice, access to complex concepts, transposed into immediate and understandable forms for everyone, and at the same time enhancing intuition as the key to advance into the unknown.
Two years after its installation, due to the complex situation that the world has had to face, the “Quintessence” project was officially presented to the public on 11 October 2022, in the presence of Ezio Previtali, director of the National Laboratories of the Gran Stone.
The work is configured as an artistic representation of astro-particle physics. Supernovae, Dark Matter and Neutrinos, some of the most current and fascinating themes of cosmology and contemporary physics, are the subject of research by the Gran Sasso Laboratories and are interpreted here by Magnani through the creative and intuitive language of art.
“Quintessence” is spread over five walls of the Research Division of the Gran Sasso National Laboratories. Four walls of five meters by two host as many installations dedicated to the four elements of the Hellenic tradition and in parallel to the four fundamental forces that govern the Universe; the fifth wall, of irregular shape, houses a circular installation of three meters in diameter dedicated to the Dark Matter. An icon and at the same time a wish from the artist to the solution of this great cosmic mystery and the unification of the fundamental forces.
For the realization of the works present in the installation, the artist exploited the effects of fluid dynamics, without touching the work with his hands, brushes or other tools. This original technique is inspired by and tries to reproduce, with all the limits of the case, the dynamics of
stellar explosions.
The works of the “Dark Matter” series, in addition, contain a background created with a phosphorescent pigment that emits yellow-green light in the dark, light that filters through the shapes created by the traditional pigment, thus producing, on an optical level, a new work completely different from the previous art and suggesting a paradigm shift and a new way of seeing things.
“By turning off the light – explains Enrico Magnani – you see something new that you had no idea about. I found the analogy with Dark Matter very pertinent: phosphorescent matter is present in the work, but we don’t perceive it using light, we need darkness; we have to change the paradigm. We too are surrounded by Dark Matter which, however, we do not see: it will be up to science to find the tool and those conditions that will allow us to identify it using a new way of looking at the world “
The installation will be accessible free to the public; information and methods of
booking at info@lngs.infn.it.
Enrico Magnani (Castelnuovo Monti, Reggio Emilia, 1972) is a contemporary Italian artist known for his works that integrate art, science and spirituality. He devoted himself completely to art after a career as a scientific researcher in the field of physics, in particular nuclear fusion. At a certain point in his life, in fact, he feels the need to use art in order to proceed along those narrow paths of knowledge where purely rational speculation is not enough, and it is therefore also necessary to draw on emotion, on that intuition. not irrational, but “differently rational” that only art allows to express. After an early figurative period, his original abstract works quickly brought him to international attention. Since 2010, museums, foundations, private galleries and public institutions in Europe and the United States have hosted his exhibitions. Among the most recent, “Enrico Magnani | Searching the Unknown ”, in 2019 at CERN in Geneva. The book “Advances in Cosmology: Science – Art – Philosophy” edited by Marilena Streit-Bianchi, Paola Catapano, Cristiano Galbiati and Enrico Magnani is out for the publishing house, focused on multidisciplinary approaches and the technologies used to probe the unknown.
Carlo Franza