NUORO, ITALY.-Museo d'Arte della Provincia di Nuoro (MAN) presents (In)Visible (In) Corporeal, curated by Pierluigi Tazzi. The artists: Intra moenia: Yves Klein, Ettore Spalletti, Anish Kapoor, Marisa Merz, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lee U Fan, Medardo Rosso, Addo Lodovico Trinci, Salis / Vitangeli, Mark Lewis, Koo Jeong-a, Giovanni Ozzola, Sabrina Mezzaqui, GianDomenico Sozzi, Francesco Dal Bosco, Robert Vincent, Davide Rivalta, Giuseppe Caccavale, Rotraut, Pastorello. Extra moenia: Cai Guo Qiang, Pawel Althamer, Piotr Uklanski

The classical world, from Egyptians to Greeks and Romans, had focused on conveying bodies' plasticity, their harmonious beauty, their movement and their way of expanding into space. Post-medieval modern artists had emphasized the visible in painting, sculpture, even in architecture. During last century artists questioned both procedures: Duchamp with his critique of what he called "retinal" art, Picasso opting for "black art" and thus deflecting the great tradition of Western sculpture. Over the last fifty years an increasing number of artists have turned toward that Other and Elsewhere neglecting the presence which the European culture linked to representation: the representation being a particular form of the presence.

(IN)VISIBLE (in)corporeal has the ambition to trace a map, partial but none the less relevant, of the most recent operational area where the parallel and integrated concepts of the invisible in the visible and the incorporeal in the tangible reveal themselves. The project aims at presenting a series of greatly varied approaches and results through a path or a story told by artworks which spring in different ways from those basic assumptions, namely the presence of the invisible in the visible and the emergence of the incorporeal in the tangible as well as the tension of the visible toward the invisible and the tangible toward the incorporeal. The chosen instruments are - as it is obvious in the case of an art exhibition - those of art; however the importance of the two opposite and interconnected axioms goes beyond the strictly art field to affect a wider area which encompasses the very meaning of culture in the present age.

This path/story begins with Yves Klein's (Nice 1928 - Paris 1962) Cosmogonie, a splendid work where the imprint of a body is rendered with the blue pigment, the essential mark of his whole work. As a matter of fact, the French artist is the one to resolutely raise the issue of an immaterial art. If this is the beginning, the path develops afterwards through stages and episodes different and distant from that original assertion.

Aesthetic sensuality and the cult of beauty elevate bodies and figures in the illusionary immateriality of their apparition in Ettore Spalletti's (Cappelle sul Tavo 1940, he lives at Spoltore) work. From the same cultural climate of the 1980's comes the reference to a spirituality which reveals itself as illusionary in Anish Kapoor's (Bombay 1954, he lives in London) materials and constructions. The tension of a nameless desire, like a passion whose only object is nothing less than the totality of sense of life and being, transfigures Marisa Merz's (she lives in Milan and Turin) work, sign and announcement of something that goes beyond the triviality of any appearance. The cancellation of image in Hiroshi Sugimoto's (Tokyo 1948, he lives in New York and Tokyo) work makes the gaze turn back to itself and its own loneliness.

The sign/gesture that marks the void in Lee U Fan's ( Gyeongnam, Korea, 1936, he lives in Kamakura) painting as well as the dissolving of form in Medardo Rosso's (Turin 1858 - Milan 1928) sculpture - two artists drawn together regardless of the time when their works have appeared - point to the constant emergence of the invisible in the visible and the incorporeal in the tangible. Addo Lodovico Trinci (Pistoia 1956, he lives in Pistoia), who marks the polarities of the energy of the universe following Feng Shui principles, and Salis/Vitangeli (Giovanna Salis, Sassari 1970, Massimo Vitangeli, Perugia 1950, they live in Polverigi) with their representation of a sacred environment inhabited by human figures similar to shadows, make visible what remains invisible and deprive bodies of their representational potentialities. Mark Lewis's (Hamilton, Ontario, 1957, he lives in London) cinema in its own filmic evidence shows what does not appear leaving at the same time the visible untouched.

Koo Jeong-a's (Seoul, 1967, she lives in Paris) interventions are always site specific and reveal, even in the delicateness of their construction, a more subtle essence that permeates bodies, materials, and figures, like a breath of wind raises and permeates a hot day, allowing what is hidden and subdued to re-emerge. Giovanni Ozzola (Florence 1982, he lives in Florence) works in his photos and videos on an auroral substance where things, feelings and forms resurface from their invisibility and turn into pale shapes or solid apparitions where something is hidden or removed. Sabrina Mezzaqui's (Bologna 1964, she lives in Marzabotto) video shows the same obviousness and can be understood only as a mobile screen blocking any further possible vision.

Giandomenico Sozzi (Solaro 1960, he lives in Milan and Noto) presents a series of monochromes, opening with some found photos and ending with a small sculpture of an absolute sacred value, which merely tells its own inscrutable story. The filmmaker Francesco Dal Bosco (Trento 1952, he lives in Trento) is the author of a passionate apologue on blindness: two moments of silence that suspend speech. Robert Vincent (working group formed in 2004) presents a dazzling environment surrounding some complicated and consecutive constructions and which is the sign of a basic absence. Davide Rivalta (Bologna 1974, he lives in Bologna), with his wall drawings, recovers the most ancient technique of representation in human art history using it to depict animals, as in the caves. However these are no longer the object of hunting; they are creatures living near us but remembered only as nutritional substances without identity, instruments in laboratories or circus, pariah of the life on earth. Giuseppe Caccavale (Afragola 1960, he lives in Bari and Marseille) too, recovers ancient ways of the Mediterranean culture which express, through outdated decoration and symbols, the sense of mystery and the search for the beautiful. The exhibition ends with Rotraut's (Uecker Klein-Moquay) cosmic images matched with Pastorello's (Sassari 1967, he lives in Sassari) rustic petit prince, a fantastic figure, symbol of the eternal childhood, who touches a star with the paintbrush.