Kapoor
Casamadre will host Anish Kapoor's exhibit until October 15th, 2016.
The Gallery is located in piazza dei Martiri in the gorgeous setting of Palazzo Partanna.
Anish Kapoor’s sculptures seem like material constructions with transcendental purposes. But they are not. Perhaps derived from remote histories and recondite meanings, they don’t describe anything. More often they appear as presences gushing forth from nothingness, almost by natural thrust, in simple, pre-linguistic forms. In some cases they are only hinted at, not yet named. They sometimes resemble plants, flowers, fruit, as if they were self-generating, flowing into the gaze with a cyclical rhythm and a simple, orderly meter. They are not basic propositions, ultimate objects, indescribable and designable only in the sense of wittgenstein, to whose philosophy american minimalist sculpture owes a great deal. Kapoor says they will always have a thousand possible names. Nor do they gather living forces, energy fields that, from beuys to merz, have shaken the very idea of western sculpture from its foundations. Thus Kapoor’s works are conceptually spatial, pure abstractions, measurements of the infinite, of absence more than presence; his action is never normative or impositional. His sculptures are suspended between the material and the immaterial, hard and soft, solid and fluid, weight and lightness, light and darkness, and the gesture they introduce also oscillates between strength and abandonment.
How can we describe the works in this exhibition: forms in motion, reflecting forms, some in the process of definition or disappearance? perhaps Kapoor’s sculptural objects are intellectual acts shaped by the uncertain etymology of obiectum: a word from late latin, meaning “that which is placed against or in front of,” both an obstacle to seeing and a screen interposed between the subject of a power and its end, like the earth between the sun and the moon. For the artist, obiectum is an indeterminate concept, a naturally infinite possibility and, like a breath or a heartbeat, an opening and closing of the optical field. It can have form and life, but neither essence nor truth. To understand Kapoor’s viewpoint, we must think of objects together with space, in opposition to Kant and his idealistic metaphysics of the a priori, overturning categories we habitually use for reflection. Accordingly, the principal theme of his now fully mature work is not visible objects that we have positioned in space, but the object as a unique extension -, hidden, compressed, swallowed up in forms. But we find it difficult to conceive being object - something without a determined subjectivity, constructed in and for itself, comprising us, not a truly existent thing, but only the content of an intellectual activity, or rather a simple movement of the soul, although nothing would be closer to the essence of art than something that has no goal other than producing mental objects. abandoning concepts of subjectivity and concepts of experience, reducing the act of consciousness to the pure contemplation of absence and void, Anish Kapoor has slowly but assuredly defined his own field of action. This is a cosmogony without transcendence, offspring of an idea without dualism. There is neither inside nor outside, only many illusory images. Thus the sculptures insist on collecting and concentrating within themselves as much of the external world as possible, as if form were an inner quality of things, unattainable and intangible; as if the sculptor’s fate were to allow this to shine through, crossing over toward what we can neither concede nor comprehend. Fundamentally all Kapoor’s art conveys a space that is sucked up and condensed into objects that remain mute and inexpressive, perfectly empty, even if they seem like presences that are corporeal and boundless (Taratantara, in Piazza Plebiscito, 2000), or indefinite and fleeting, like some of the these works. Confronting his art, regardless of its actual dimensions, there is always a feeling that there is something more that might be seen and perhaps intuited, something bigger or clearer that might drag us beyond what we are seeing but remains like an imprisoned power. In its incessant movement, the veil of art contorts, seems as if it might pull away, leaving us to imagine a possible revelation, both desired and feared. but the sculpture-obiectum protrudes into the void of formless forms and spacious spaces. Nothing more.
