Page 222 - Museum

Contemporary thought is eclectic. Man is
moving ever closer to a culture of becoming,
and not of being. Art, in general, thus
becomes an evocation of other possible
worlds, provided that it does not have
history at its complete disposal without
having first run through its spatiotemporal
context. But nowadays this does not
happen. Now man is disappointed by art
because he expects from it the realisation
of something that is other-than-himself.
He expects new indications, while art
can only manage to pile dust on dust.
The most tragic and painful aspect is that
in this culture of becoming man is ever
more aware that he is a creature that can
in no way go beyond itself. Faced with the
rapid-fire mutations of objective evidence,
he is destabilised and incapable of finding
his centre within the real. The artist, the
poet, incapable of taking charge of the
real that is incessantly eluding his grasp,
substitutes it with a universe of signs,
colours and words that endlessly repeat
the painful truth: “man is a creature that
possesses no means with which to move
beyond itself. he is a prisoner of his own
making, incapable of fighting himself”. This
is an implacable repetition that, however,
remains immutable before the void of life;
it continues to repeat itself precisely in
order to find an escape route, a solution
to dramatic, anxiety-ridden tension. Yet
in our era, people often become artists
to satisfy a need for identity; art is used
to affirm a depressing and lamentable
individuality, and this is an agony we are all
guilty of having brought about. The origins
of this agony can be found in the figure of
contemporary man himself. At the end of
the 20th century, in order to survive (in
the existential sense) his de-centrality in
reference to reality, to the impossibility
of affirming himself as a being in the

 SUNNY MELBOURNE, 2007 MIXED MEDIA ON
HANDMADE PAPER 22X30 IN. | 56X76 CM.
 MELBOURNE AT SUNSET, 2007 MIXED MEDIA ON
HANDMADE PAPER 22X30 IN. | 56X76 CM.

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