One could try to sustain the theory that as man became more and more intellectualized (and electronically mechanized), the residue extrasensory faculties which he used to escape from the physical dangers of a hostile environment, became weaker and weaker. One could maintain that the crisis of human extrasensory perception derives from the birth (probably 150.000 years ago) of phonetic language (possibly a mutation in the FOXP2 gene), an event which is generally hailed as one of the decisive moments in the evolution of our central nervous system, and therefore, of human civilization.
In the beginning was the "Word"! (Or was "Shape" and "Perception of Metaphor"¹) antecedent to "Word"?!)
However, the magical and efficient operation of transforming and organizing the substance of a "reality", or of an object, following the process of abstract and symbolic thought, into sounds or a series of sounds, has been an expensive luxury. This inevitably led to the creation of a barrier between the individual and reality, and communion with a mysterious multi-dimensional universe.
At present - December 2006 - (if we are not mistaken and have understood the "state-of-the-art" correctly, and "Loop Quantum Gravity theory" notwithstanding) the "String theory" and "Branes theory" both hypothetically require nine or more dimensions. Our universe, or, if you prefer, that part or "bubble" of the "hyperspace" in which we live, is also variously composed of "quasars", "pulsars", "supernovas", "brown dwarfs", "neutrinos", "quarks", "antimatter", "black holes", "gravitational waves", "gravitational lenses"²), "dark matter" ("axions?"), "dark energy" etc. and conceivably "morphic fields" and "morphic resonance"³) as applicable to the more complex manifestations of agglomerations of living cells. These agglomerations, at times, are conscious expressions of an awe-inspiring "reality" which appears even weirder, more incomprehensible, warped, absurd, bizarre and "entangled"⁴) than what quantum theory would seem to suggest and what "String theory" and/or "Branes theory" are, hopefully, attempting to "unravel". ("Information theory" has suggested a few answers).
Phonetic language has made interpersonal communication far easier but, at the same time, has, perhaps, limited its horizons.
Speaking of literature, and not of music, nor of metaphysical symbolism, we come to the crux of the problem: While accepting Noan Chomsky's inspired "specific hypothesis" of "generative grammar", we also have to consider that sounds, designated by individual social conventions, becomes transformed into the graphic signs corresponding to such sounds. Thus, with the Greek, Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets, representing, as they do, the great majority of graphic literary expression of sounds throughout the ages, we have become, all too willingly, the (admittedly creative) slaves to the assembly line of linear alphabets.
On the other hand, in Pharaonic Egyptian, in Oriental and other languages based on hieroglyphics, pictograms or ideograms, a sound generally referring to, or combined with other symbols, originally representing an actual object or situation, connected with an object. An association of symbols, however, may also at times be used phonetically.
In this way, we obtain a series of sounds that describe a third object or situation, not necessarily connected, or only partly connected, with the original one. For the "western mind" all this process activates unusual areas of the brain. Thus, Marshall McLuhan was certainly not in error when he referred to Chinese as an "audio - tactile" language rather than a "visual" one.
It is in this phonetic, semantic, epistemic and linguistic context that Lorenzo Scaretti's work must be viewed.
Phrases, sounds and concepts cease to be, totally or in part, the alphabetic symbols of the sounds and are transformed into sculptural objects or graphic representations of phonetic vibrations.
Actually, these artefacts go beyond the ludic aspect of word games of Marcel Duchamp, of Man Ray and the theories of visual poetry, combining a new abstract surrealism with pop art, conceptual, and post modern art.
Furthermore, the works are aestethically pleasing, are executed with great craftsmanship and display a great sense of humour. By skilful use of the pun, the artist manages to mock not only vacuity in contemporary art and popular attitudes towards scientific "certitudes", but also himself in the process too !
Vladimir Nabokov wrote that "the pun is mightier than the word" and that people who cannot play with words cannot properly work with them either ("A man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one" Oscar Wilde). It is a fact that few people are able to play with phonetics, and this is the result of too much emphasis being placed today on academic acquisition of consequential facts. The modern human mind (the digital brain), tired of consequential, either/or, binary logic, leaps to new revelations and intuitions through the use of puns. Prose will not be soon obsolescent but the pun is always the more immediate form of expression, since puns instantly condense an idea into an image. The East is changing places with the West: we are becoming more "audio-tactile". The word-phrase object is important, and man is too often judged by the words he utters or writes, but not often enough by the images he sees in his mind and subsequently reproduces.
Capturing out of the "wild blue yonder" an image of a rhyme with a reason.
If philosophy can be applied to this kind of artist, couldn't we call him a "neurobiological operator" who "constructs" (Emmanuel Kant) and "de-constructs" (Friedrich Hegel and Jacques Derrida) both at the same time? Lorenzo would have liked to have been a fan of Baruch Spinoza or Emanuele Severino, but finds Richard Rorty much more "accessible". Lorenzo now considers himself an "ironical theorist": he does not completely believe, or fully understand, what he, in utter bewilderment, so emphatically asserts.

DEFINITIONS:

"Four- dimensional visual objects representing strings of thought and metaphor tied together into acoustic knots by puns and alliterations thereby lending resonance of sound to meaning".