“If the eye were not solar, how could we see light?”. This is the question he poses to the world of art and to the individual more generally, the artist Cristiano Carottiwith his third solo show at the White Noise gallery in Rome. Trying to explore the various answers that art can offer and demonstrate, helping us to solve Goethe’s “The theory of colors”, from which the title of the exhibition takes its cue, which contrasts with positivist theories that observe nature only from a scientific point of view.
A project with which the artist, in addition to letting himself be influenced by nature in all its strength and immensity, returns to devote himself to painting after years dedicated almost exclusively to ceramics. Although the sculpture is by no means abandoned. Indeed, in the same exhibition there are various ceramics that allow that same nature to almost take “life”, through the movement of snakes made stable in the form in some works.
But the artist’s work as a ceramist is also somehow found in his painting, where the material grafts seem to permeate with ceramic elements. In a series of canvases where a sort of hybridization of the elements is perceived, for a squaring of the circle of experiences matured in recent years. Hence the title which refers to Goethe’s theory of colors, as opposed to positivism which places nature as a mere object of study: protons and electrons moving on a microscopic geoid in an infinitesimal galaxy of a universe impossible to imagine for the mind Human.
But the artist’s research, in his latest works, is also contained in the images and subjects, with Carotti choosing a sparse and wild symbolism, immersed in landscapes with powerful and acid colors. Bringing us back to look at the earth with the stoic resistance of thistles, with herds of animals in the wild and the poetic darkness of the night sky as a backdrop. Leaving a glimpse of a strong spirituality. After all, the ability to perceive the divine in natural elements (a concept that has as many definitions and nuances as there are human beings) is our prerogative and the cornerstone of a spirituality that we have lost along the way, as the editors write, Eleonora Aloise and Carlo Maria Lolli Ghetti.
The central question of the project that brought the artist back to painting after years of monogamy towards ceramics was the question of when we abandoned the awareness and privilege of being the only entity capable of perceiving the divine. The eye was designed to welcome light and translate it into an image, when did we stop considering it a miracle? «Among Carotti’s thistles and wandering animals there is life and death, the fences to be repainted and the perseverance of day and night», writes Aloise. In his ceramic snakes, however, there is the fear and beauty of rebirth. To complete the path and make the atmosphere even more suggestive, in fact, is an installation of ceramic vipers, wrapped in the original music of Rodrigo D’Erasmo and Mario Conte, made up of the same colors and cracks as the canvases, becoming a sort of narrator that accompanies the viewer to the end of the exhibition. Offering the last act of a journey that goes from sunrise to sunset, through the myths of life and death, which close the circle giving us the fear and hope of rebirth.