Suspended like time, like perception. Suspended between sight and its absence, between one’s limits and their overcoming, between this world and elsewhere. Betweenness is the feeling that runs through “Suspended,” Luca Spano’s solo exhibition at Red Lab Gallery in Milan, which features a selection of works from 2022 to the present, each different in technique and materials, but all sharing a profound underlying coherence.
Luca Spano’s poetics tells of a liminal space suspended between boundaries that are not only physical, but also conceptual. In his practice, science, art, anthropology and philosophy merge and mingle in a firm attempt to cross the frontier between disciplines. Because, after all, self-enclosing within a rigid definition is still a form of limitation. The artist intends to overcome these limits by investigating that thin line between the visible and invisible, the unknown area that triggers knowledge construction.
Far Away Structures (2022) is a series of different elements, each one the result of conversations the artist has carried out with physicists and researchers to investigate the complexity of perceptual phenomena. The work becomes an exercise in knowledge, the result of the relationship that science weaves with sight and image. Each letter that makes up the thoughts is suspended on a sheet of glass, transforming the word into a veil that separates two dimensions. Over time, the metal support that holds up the glass rusts, escaping the artist’s control. The same process is also present in The Meaning of Touching (2022), in which a base of rusted iron and its oxidation process create an abstract geography that is not entirely predictable, while conveying the idea of the passage of time and the inexorable change that affects everything. The series shows encrypted phrases, inspired by thoughts from Greek philosophy centered on the mechanisms of sight. The tactile reading system is coded in braille language, but the dots are replaced with sharp fragments of broken glass. In order to decode the inscriptions one must be willing to injure oneself, which makes the meaning inaccessible in some ways, highlighting the complexity of the process of cognition.
Sight is conventionally held to be the primary medium for experiencing the world. Yet every work by Luca Spano seems to suggest that this is not entirely true. One example is 35 days of radiation (2023), a work in which the artist makes the invisible visible by recording the presence of radioactive particles in his studio for thirty-five days, several times a day. A silent presence, invisible to the naked eye but an omnipresent transformative force of us and the environment.
The journey into the universe of knowledge ideally concludes with As Far as (2024). Inspired by the conceptual work by artist Lawrence Weiner’s As Far as the Eye Can See, Spano’s work makes concrete the distance between the human gaze and the world. In the installation, obsidian fragments float in space on top of a video display. The rocks are very close to the monitor, where an eye moves frantically but, despite its efforts, can never fully grasp the world.
All we have to do, then, is to close our eyes-and start looking.
—Elisabetta Masala
at RedLab Gallery, Milan
until May 31, 2024