Black Hole. An intuitive feel for the beauty of the unseen

In Bergamo, GAMeC’s spaces offer an exhibition encompassing 37 artists exploring artistic speculations related to post-industrial times when the relationship with the object became weaker. Their artworks are sculptures, installations or paintings made of artificial and natural elements, often randomly assembled, as the artists search for the origin and purpose of determined surfaces. The museum encompasses the darkest, the obscure exhibition atmosphere ever realized within its own spaces, subdivided in three different sections: in order to amplify the visitor’s perception of materiality, even including its opposite dimensions. And, as a matter of fact, the entire group show seems to produce matter or therefore existence.

Indeed, the first section, voted to informal practices, boasts any intent to represent the world, using material configurations whose indeterminacy transmits an idea of reality as a constantly changing substance. This line of research is pursued by Antoni Tàpies with his lumpy surfaces woven with tears and rips; by Alberto Burri in the tarry density of his Combustioni, and in his Cretti; in the early works of Piero Manzoni; and, decades later, by Urs Fischer’s formless Big Clay pieces; Cameron Jamie’s oozing statues; and Ryan Sullivan’s ethereal dripping, chapped abstractions.

The origins of this research come also from Jean Fautrier and his concretions of stratified colour, as well as Lucio Fontana, who cut into matter in his Nature, penetrating and ripping it to the point that it became an animated opus. This kind of artworks’ juxtaposition creates primordial matter that both living and non-living beings share. Thus, the unity between the object and the subject, between the real and the spiritual declaims the main concept beyond “Black Hole. Art and materiality from Informal to Invisible”. The artists hereby examine obscurely how everything is entangled and connected. How boundaries between nature and culture intertwining or/and efface. This is the reason why “Black Hole” sculptures and paintings can not only be perceived as appearances in their raw, authentic state but as dissolution of matter. In the second section (titled Humankind-Matter) Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso’s plastic fusion, among the others, with images of faces and limbs emerging from indistinct bodies constitutes a significant historical precedent in the research undertaken by a series of artists who, in different forms, converged the debate on matter and exploration of the person in a single creative vision.

Invisible, Movimento Arte Nucleare’s works and Jean Dubuffet’s Texturologies accompany artist Jol Thomson setting a dialogue between science and art by investigating the territories of the material unknown, of the intangible and of the non-optical. In the wake of Hicham Berrada’s performances, which invite the spectator to a direct experience of the energies and forces emerging from matter, as well as Thomas Ruff’s Photograms of abstract compositions. On the whole, “Black Hole”’s artworks represent passages, open ended as invisible paths. Metal’s rhythm and fluidity, transition and transmission suspended in time. The past and the future lose their significance under the concept of immanence. An integral struggle takes place within the sculptured surfaces, creating a distance between the object and the viewers, who force them to confront themselves, to find their own significance in the world.