Lorenzo Scaretti Gallery: Exhibitions Art

Quotations

"My words are mine and not yours, and do not belong to you. All must come out of your own being"

Zen concept

"I taught you some words, but not the truth that lies behind them"

Galileo Galilei

"Philosophy is the struggle against the enchantments exercised on the mind by language"

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Since man only thinks throuh the use of words and external symbols, these same words and external symbols could turn to man and say: "You do not mean anything at all other than what we have taught you"."

Charles Sander Peirce

"Language is indicative of a will to make all things of this world (which by their very nature are part of an eternal process) become other things: words and signs...... Words and writing are a potent and complex attempt at an "imposition to define" which however is destinated to fail since it seeks the impossible........
Words, even poetical words, are only nets thrown over things of this world which in any case they fail to capture in their true essence.... such nets are illusions since one is never in a position to capture eternity."

paraphrasing Emanuele Severino in "La Gloria"

"Tactile and sonic qualities of language: 1) Sound wills meaning into being; 2) Words adhere to each other acoustically; 3) Words make patterns of sound and the meaning that such patterns throw up can be quite different from the surface meaning creating clusters of sounds which echo or play off against each other."

Tom Paulin

"Uncovering profound and hidden significances in the assononances and rhythm of language enchantingly leads us beyond the limits of rational thought."

L. S.

"(Undoubtedly there is a) central position among the arts of art forms whose medium is language."

Noam Chomsky

"The beauty and elegance of a mathematical equation are no guarantee of the equation's validity yet they spur us to enthusiastically defend its assumptions and conclusions."

Andrew Wiles

"Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth"."

Karl G. Jung

"Science and aesthetics are complementary, not conflicting."

Michael Seherner

"Reason should be the servant of intuition. We have created a society which honours the servant and forgets the master."

Albert Einstein

"Intuition the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of though and leaps straight from problem to answer."

Robert Graves

"Creative thinking may simply mean the realization that there is no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done."

Rudolph Flesch

"The whole of science is nothing more then a refiniment of everyday thinking ...he who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good dead; his eyes are closed."

Albert Einstein

"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness."

Pablo Picasso

"Art is the objectification of feeling and the subjectification of nature."

Susanne K. Langer

"..I do not mean art to be a mirror of life. Eventually, if it wants to , life can - at its risk and peril - mirror itself in art."

Felice Levini

"Le beau est toujours bizarre. Je ne veux pas dire qu'il soit volontairement, froidement bizarre, car dans ce cas il serait un monstre sorti de rails de la vie. Je dis qu'il contient toujours un peu de bizarrie, de bizarrie naive, non voulue, inconsciente, et que c'est cette bizarrie qui le fait etre particulierement Beau."

Charles Baudelaire

"The road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways on tha brain."

Eric R- Kandel

"He who understands baboons would do more toward metaphysics than Locke."

Charles Darwin

"Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human brain. Humour tells us more about how the brain works than any other human activity "

Edward de Bono

".....The greatest challenge to Western thought, is that the existence of a strict line separating human beings from nonhuman beings may simply be a figment of our imagination."

Lee M. Silver

"There are many aspect of humanity that we still need to understand for which there are no useful models. Perhaps we should pretend that morality is known only to the gods and that if we treat humans as model organism for the gods, then in studying ourselves we may come to understand the gods as well."

Sidney Brenner

"The discovery that individul events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the 2()th century. I suggest that this is the strongest indication we are of a reality "out there" existing indipendently of us."

Anton Zeilinger

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

William Shakespeare
(Hamlet)

"Your theory is crazy but it is not crazy enough to be true."

Niels Bohr

Critiques

Lorenzo Scaretti's artistic endeavours are an all-out "Pun-ic war" against the conventional. If in art as in strategy the alternative to the conventional is only nuclear then the responsability for the ultimate indecision will be left to those Hamlets of this world who reduce everything to dilemmas; dilemmas which in turn notoriously lead to tragic solutions. It is an oriental tradition to let images rest on stilts made from words: in Chinese painting it is imperative to have descending rivulets of astonished verses to express the simplest of concepts; arabs, condemned by the First Commandment to abstract painting, invented the arabesque: visual rythms of letters and verse. In the west however, a Giorgione who writes "col tempo" in the magical space under the portrait of an old woman is an exception – until of course Braque’s collages arrived or until the suprematist, or Jasper Johns, or "l’art pauvre" used the alphabet (since we are in a mood for citations) as Beethoven did in the last movement of the ninth symphony when Shiller’s words litterally blew from his creativity to complete the harmony of another means of artistic expression. No. With Lorenzo Scaretti the word is in the beginning; whatever he may have learned from Magritte’s absurdly light blue skies or Fontana’s "teatrini" it is only a background in the same way as Renaissance pictorial sceneries are a background of the human figure: here these distinct artistic styles all subtly put to the use of other disquieting echos. It is of secondary importance that the comment to the phonetics is in two dimensions (painting) two and a half (bas-relief) or three (sculpture) nor should it come as a surprise when in subsequent developments Lorenzo Scaretti’s spacial dimensions will become four, five or even more.

Ruggero Orlando 1977
(U.S.A. Corrispondent Italian Tv)
(click here for italian version)

The sense, when this word is used in reference to the sense of a word or the sense of an image, and which instead is not its true significance, constitutes for LS the field of his research. He trives to discover true sense and true significance. This inevitably leads us to non-sense. If however one deems the real sense to be the formal definition, then it signifies banality, obviousness, emptiness and absence. Here we do not only witness the repetition of the Dada school, deconsacration and mockery or a game whereby, revealing a trick, life rediscovers its truth. On viewing these works one gets the impression that there is an uneasiness to be redeemed and a solitude to be overcome. The circle, the cube and the sphere are impalpable prisons which divide and make existence absurd, conversation impossible, contact illusory, meetings artificial experiences; yet simultaneously cause nostalgia to be true, dreams real and imagination tangible. The return to the origins where the word was object-thing-instrument for use, and not only a sound. The name was “numen” and not “omen”; a sign and not an absence. The travails of LS are in this insatiable quest for truth, simplicity, purity; an expectation of azure skies, limitless flights, vast space and perfect equilibrium. A spirit of clarity, subtlety of intelligence, profundity of knowledge, so that everything can return to truth like a flower that grows and is the significance of the world. Intelligence against conformism, academic knowledge to counter banality, poetry against artifice. A contrary-wise existence: contrary to everything that is a limit or a wall, contrary to an offence which is a wound to freedom, happiness or sensitivity. A struggle and a research that reveals an absolute anxiety to demystify and “de-define” everything that is warped by pretence (sham), illusion, deceit, mere appearance: the enemies of life. The flight of a fly, the hand of a doll, a stuffed bird, the most abstruse of symbols, the most common of words used in our daily repertoire, return to be that which they really are, no longer what, by convention and habit or hypocrisy, we say that they should mean. So the contrary, the image and its double, the word and its sound can mean or return to reveal to us their true meaning. We can thereby live the inherent truth of a sign, the significance of poetry,the purity of desire and the dream we have never forgotten. These images reveal a direct contact with the continent of the unconscious, with the unforeseen relationships in the territory of the infinite. Intelligence constructs beyond absurd barriers erected by repression, violence, silence and the fear of the oases of innocence. A magic dimension where life is life, love is love, a word is a word, the image an image and we can desperately be real because of the freedom and happiness we derive in the gesture of the movement of our lips in the utterance of the sound that is a word.

Elio Mercuri 1975
(Art Critic)
(click here for italian version)