The exhibition Conversation Piece Part VIII: Notte Oscura (Dark Night) at the Fondazione Memmo features Pauline Curnier Jardin, Victor Man and Miltos Manetas in a nuanced dialogue on the theme of darkness and gloom. While necessarily relating to the luminous counterpart of the light-shadow dichotomy, this dialogue is based on the theoretical premise of John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic who was one of the most relevant saints in Christianity. In his writings, John of the Cross considers darkness in unorthodox, non-dichotomous terms, referring to darkness and night as “moments of waiting and decanting of thought, of seductive and complex ambiguities, a crucial phase of the journey towards knowledge and revelation”, as the exhibition text reminds us.
The exhibition, therefore, aims to present different ways the night is conceived of, considering darkness as a factor of inspiration and creativity, connected to the contemporary ‘darkness’ in which we are immersed – amidst wars, pandemics, and climate and social crises. The three artists in the exhibition, with their expressive energy, each develop an environment based on very different, yet related themes resulting in an evocative and disturbing exhibition. Marseille-born Pauline Curnier Jardin poses feminist themes in relation to those of war, a dark past based on the drama of World War II and in all the forgotten or distorted her-story. The resulting transfiguration of architectural space is eerie and bleak, but also ‘magical’ – a cosmic and vibrant magic. The Transylvanian artist Victor Man, on the other hand, presents a series of dark, nocturnal paintings, almost metaphysical and never easily decipherable, moving between literature, art history, collective memory and personal experience. In these works, the natural element at times and social constructions in others, almost makes the human element, always tormented in the details and perspectives, disappear.
The highly poetic spaces dedicated to these two artists are both reached from the first room of the foundation, which is dedicated to the multimedia environment of Miltos Manetas: #ManetasFloatingStudio. Unlike the other two, it is less gloomy and more cryptic, just as any digital perception is less gloomy (because made of light) and more cryptic compared to its analogue counterpart. This is, however, equally obscure, an oxymoronic obscurity – a stunning luminous obscurity, one consisting of bits or based on digital foundations.
The Greek artist Manetas proposes a work in situ and in progress with the help of his ‘assistant’ DALL-E (AI capable of generating images from textual descriptions). Manetas defines this type of work as his ‘contemporary cave’ which, in short, is an environment totally covered by his anti-painting (a light, ephemeral paint produced by pouring liquid soap over colour pigments on the wall, with no basic preparation), continuously tracing and erasing the images produced by DALL-E. In fact, the work continuously changed shape during the course of the exhibition, with the artist periodically intervening. The environment, therefore, acquires anti-analogue characteristics: analogue-digital in its demiurgy, digital mimesis in its display, leading the concrete walls of the exhibition space to resemble – not so much in form as in meaning – a digital environment, a screen of our ever-changing existential technological devices, eternally poised between aesthetics and knowledge, never stable or ever completely clear. The relationship between Manetas and DALL-E is reciprocal and fruitful for a work that cuts across different planes of reality. Manetas and DALL-E, as one, are a cyborg, but their product is totally opposed to the bit, irreconcilable with digital space. Rather, the artist becomes a rupestrian cyborg, a machine that has not forgotten its thousand-year human history, producing a contemporaneity strongly characterised by digital technology, but human at heart. And what can be more obscure for the human – living by sensations, perceptions, senses – than digital space, produced by bits and generated by rational databases? In his analogue and almost tribal environment (the ‘cave’) Manetas foregrounds all elements that, when speaking of the digital, are exclusively human.
This environment thus becomes a metaphor for the human condition, immersed in the fluid container of knowledge that is digital space, between the reassuring but perturbing features of a reality tangent to that of carbon. But this ‘cave’ is also inhabited by an almost ‘prehistoric creature’ (born 20 years ago in a space where the obsolescence of things takes place almost in real time) that carries with it the same metaphor: ManingtheDark.com (2004), a humanoid figure floating in the darkness, a projection of a proto-NFT in the form of a website overlaid on the walls.
Manetas’s device, therefore, is complex and multifaceted, transcending the analogue-digital dichotomy just as the exhibition itself transcends the light-dark dichotomy. The darkness that Manetas displays is the ‘darkness of knowledge’ that grips us, between the analogue and the digital in which we exist, in which the concept of truth and falsehood can no longer find meaning. ManingtheDark.com is an illusion – a phantasmagorical creature posing as real in a real space posing as phantasmagorical. Boundaries become imperceptible and luminous darkness makes digital ghosts appear. Caves become simulacra of the web while reality becomes more and more multifaceted with a decisive, ephemeral complexity.
Conversation Piece Part VIII: Notte Oscura, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, Fondazione Memmo, until March 26, 2023
Artists: Pauline Curnier Jardin, Victor Man, Miltos Manetas
images: (cover 1-4-5) Fondazione Memmo, Miltos Manetas, Installation View, ph. Daniele Molajoli (2) Fondazione Memmo, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Installation View, ph. Daniele Molajoli (3) Fondazione Memmo, Victor Man, Installation View, ph. Daniele Molajoli
