Neapolitan artist Nera D’Auto shares with us her work presented at European Organization for Nuclear Research – By N. D’Auto
The project that I presented at CERN art and science, is the result obtained following a path that began with the study of color as wavelength, frequency and speed of light. To these elements is added the atom, component of every matter, with its properties of character/shape and mass. This is the starting point for an artistic journey that sees, autonomously, color inserted between the atoms of matter, a fundamental body that plays between voids and solids on the support.
With an eye turned to the atomistic theory of Democritus and the awareness of the lack of knowledge that characterizes humanity about the universe, I play with color, I give it life, emotions, feelings, different masses in a new space, made of a whirlwind of colors that bend and surround masses, that become rarefied or thickened so as to establish fullness and emptiness, where the fullness is given by the materiality of the color and the emptiness is the place where evolving situations and combinations take place. Of course I allowed myself some questionable liberties in certain respects, but everything is not as it seems. Looking at things and thinking to know them is pure madness. In fact, what appears to our eyes is only the appearance of a much more complex substance that escapes us. Many questions that cannot be answered arise in everyday life while the world around us surpasses all imagination and is perhaps simpler than we believe. I did this analysis in more depth when I tried to understand the color. I mastered the graphics but color, this element that makes life shine and gives meaning to things, represented a mystery similar to what lies behind dark matter. My child mind made an enormous effort to understand that color is information given by light which is broken down into wavelengths and frequencies in the interaction with materials. Even more difficult was to understand the light that comes from the interiority of the human being, who is bearer of a different light that speaks of intensity and feelings, of probability and changes and is poorly subjected to logical reasoning that needs to give matter answers that satisfy. This type of inner light is also the response I find to the concert of sounds given by the installations presented at CERN’s art and science, which are full of bouncing elements: compression and expansion of waves that transmit their time.
Looking at the perforated panels, installations presented in this project, it is not possible to understand how color can be the nothingness that appears between the different shapes. I arrived at this result naturally when I tried to remove mass from colour, a constant play on my works, a characteristic of its own.
Each color, in my work, has a mass, as well as a precise character. The game of removing intensity from a color produced a hole from which I glimpsed a becoming of life: color as an element/mass that can become extinct and lose consistency to the point of generating emptiness, a emptiness that speaks to us of the place where matter is combines, where infinite probabilities of existence are possible, where matter can take on a new body and regenerate.
The final result of the work presented is a matter at rest, an installation with gold from which packets of energy pass in succession, a whole where the mass is given by the grid that surrounds the holes through which the light passes and bouncing elements vibrate. Different holes from different elements create variety in the material: round, square, triangular elements, whose alphabet responds to their own characteristics, alternate and repeat themselves disorderly in each piece of the work, a set of mass/energy. The installation in its entirety presents itself as a set of waves in succession, containing a swarm of vibrations between the spaces, it is a musicality that can change with a simple movement and transform its content.
The work that I present and that I would like to create, with suitable materials and with notions acquired through the exchange of ideas and the knowledge of advanced techniques, such as CERN can provide me, is the knowledge of the musical vibration between the different spaces of the void, something , which I think, can also provide an answer to other knowledge and other voids, such as those that dwell in the soul of man – If man is made of the same material as the universe, it means that every knowledge benefits both – Knowledge of the void is the topic I would like to discuss and learn more about. Knowing what happens in the void and knowing how the multiple possibilities of possible moments of life can combine or annihilate due to a simple event is fundamental for a complete knowledge that can give the man the exact dimension of the wonderful life that he possesses. This matter that we know is directed by a whole dark world that is much larger but which we ignore. In this regard, it is necessary to know so as not to leave the future to the machines that would like to manage the human mind.
Nera D’Auto
