In this naturalistic painting, there is no human being. And yet… Even when a painting appears to be empty of human presence, there is the inescapable human presence of the one who painted it. Your gaze on the painting merges with the artist’s gaze. You see, through the emotions and the eyes of the one who spent hours studying this landscape. Art is a gift, it’s a “present”—the word is well chosen. The artist becomes disembodied, transcending the physical, to offer you a front-row seat on the stage of his creation, where you’re invited to immerse yourself in his illusory representation of the world.
We are all equal, but not in the way we usually think. Imagine that we are made up of Legos, with each Lego representing a distinct experience, cultural background, or genetic component. Our entirety forms a colorful construction that reveals how we share certain Legos—in varying degrees—with others, shaping who we are. Indeed, we are “non-uniform units“, and it is in this mosaic that we find our equality.
It is often the little things that are the basis of progress… So let me tell you a little story about the tiniest thing on earth: the dot.
Thousands of years ago, a man in his solitude scanned the night sky and saw all those dots shining like so many still fireflies, and, perhaps for fun, he decided to join them together to form shapes. This is how zodiac signs and astronomy were born.
Far away, in ancient India, the dot symbolized beauty and the eye of knowledge. But even more, the dot they called “shunya-bindu” (शून्यबिन्दु) represented what we nowadays know as zero. It was first a placeholder and then a fully fledged number, for when it is added to the right of the representation of any given digit, the value of the digit is multiplied by ten. This is how our current numbers and decimal numeration system were born.
While drawing or painting, visual artists of all times used to fix a dot – or more specifically a point in space – which was traditionally visualized from the tip of their thumb. Eventually, when this point receded so far away in space, it became known as a “vanishing point”. A vanishing point is where all converging lines of a landscape meet at the horizon. This is how perspective and geometry were born.
One day, medieval musicians were tired of having to rely solely on their memories to remember songs. So they started to use dots, named “puncti”, placed on or between four lines to represent the pitch and duration of a sound. This is how musical notation and programming were born.
In the modern era, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, dots were used in many other symbolic forms: bumps, holes, single tones, flashes of light… Do the terms Braille, Morse, punched card, or pixel sound familiar to you? This is how communication and coding were born.
This is how the humble dot, often overlooked, has served as a fundamental building block for countless advancements throughout history. Never underestimate the power of small things; within a dot was the whole universe.
Presenting a sneak peek of my upcoming philosophical book on perception.
In this exploration, I dissect the dynamic interplay between our “self,” the elusive “perception sphere,” and the external world. Operating independently, the perception sphere lacks self-awareness, creating a symbiotic relationship with the self, which, in turn, relies on the sphere for perceiving both itself and the external world.
Per celebrare la luce è stato realizzato un percorso espositivo nell’Università di Firenze dedicato alle illusioni ottiche. La mostra, curata da un comitato scientifico, ospita anche molte delle mie opere.
To celebrate light, an exhibition’s itinerary was created at the University of Florence to explore the world of optical illusions. The exhibition, curated by a scientific committee, also hosts many works of mine.
Per celebrare la luce è stato realizzato un percorso espositivo nell’Università di Firenze dedicato alle illusioni ottiche. La mostra, curata da un comitato scientifico, ospita anche molte opere dell’artista di arte ottica Gianni Sarcone. Leggi: https://t.co/QW8BrU6hOFpic.twitter.com/1vNArm9DZL
This series of works questions the many cognitive aspects of faces’ recognition. People often see hidden faces in things, clouds, landscapes, or in architectural structures… Finding the latent or virtual image hidden in the manifest image is a mental process related to the concept of the “lost object” used in psychoanalysis. As an artist, I enjoy including subliminal messages or figures in my work. My paintings, photographs and collages play on the foreground and background relationship of our visual perception and represent common or iconic faces the viewer has to rediscover.
Photomosaic portrait of Albert Einstein made with random photographs of numbers. It is only when the viewer moves away from the image that the portrait of Einstein appears. It is the distance that creates and unveils the truth, because everything is relative as Einstein once said and everything depends on the context, the environment or the point of view.
Salvador Dalí : Sept corps nus et un crâne, 1951 (Human skull consisting of seven naked women).
Often symbols of MORTALITY (or some romantic notion of immortality – as the belief that a spiritual part of a person survives death) and POWER, skulls have been employed in human rituals and art since the dawn of humanity: from the ancient animal skulls in Paleolithic burial sites, to the curlicued cattle skulls that haunt Georgia O’Keeffe’s canvasses. Skulls cannot be assumed to be only a mere symbol of death, they are also used in initiation rituals as a symbol of REBIRTH, symbolizing the ‘sephirah daath’ (סְפִירָה – sephirah, “enumeration” in Hebrew) on the cabalistic tree of life, the gateway to a higher awareness only achievable through spiritual death and rebirth.
“Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour films, music, books, paintings, poems, photographs, conversations, dreams, trees, architecture, street signs, clouds, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work will be authentic… Don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. Remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
