Every exhibition project becomes, at least for me, a pretext to draw attention to a striking idea, concept or topic. In this instance, I have to thank Stefano Spera for his new exhibition, “WAITING FOR BIAS” as it offers a brilliant aesthetic and conceptual synthesis of a question that concerns us all, exploring our way of observing, understanding and communicating. As you might imagine from the title of the exhibition, the elements that circumscribe this area of speculation are expectation and prejudice.
Regarding the latter, research in the field of cognitive psychology has recently clarified that it is not always possible to apply exclusively rational thought. As we have evolved, human beings have acquired a series of automatic behaviours, making heuristic decisions to survive in hostile environments. Without going into all the scientific details, we can simply define them as automatic thinking mechanisms that help us quickly reach a solution in a specific context. We could call them mental stratagems for making quick decisions with minimal cognitive effort. To tackle the majority of situations, our brain relies on prejudices which are sound and tested mental patterns. There are, however, a number of situations that we can only deal with correctly by stepping away from our established mind maps.
It would be a mistake to merely resort to such maps when dealing with new scenarios. We are confronted by our bias, that is, the tendency to create our own subjective reality, this does not necessarily correspond to facts and is developed on the basis of our interpretation of the information we possess, even though these might not be logically or semantically connected to each other, which can lead to an error of evaluation or lack of objectivity in judgment. This lack of objectivity is probably mainly determined by the most primitive, ancestral and instinctive components of our brain. This means that cognitive biases cannot be excluded a priori, but we can learn to recognise them and take them into account a posteriori. Seen in this context expectation, that is the time spend waiting as well as the desire or anxiety with which we look forward to an event, is our condition as living beings in continuous movement. While Beckett’s waiting seems to be a nullifying wait, without any hope, Stefano Spera’s waiting, his expectation, opens up to a minimal, complex, and creative movement. Revisiting the classics, in particular Greek mythology, Spera has identified a number of myths and by appropriating their particular characteristics he has built a space that is ideal for reflecting on human nature between past, present and future. The viewer is led up, down and across a number of levels, entering and exiting different scenarios portrayed in individual pictorial works and digital prints on vinyl. These are all devices through which the individual and collective imagination can understand the events of history and learn to read reality through fiction. Mythology, psychology, art, history and technology coexist and intertwine. Five figures from Greek myths and heroes have been selected—Pandora, Icarus, Paris, Oedipus and Narcissus—and we see the evidence of their bias through the history of art, their representation in contemporary reality and their projection into the future with the help of artificial intelligence, the modern oracle. This representation gives us a less epic, less courageous, and less instinctive narrative. The unexpected and the unknown are completely hollowed out . . . desire, fear, emotion, intuition and creation are erased. In retrospect we might have found an answer, a solution for each one, the precise answer, the right thing to do. Pandora would not have opened the box, Icarus would not have plummeted into the sea, Paris would have made the right choice, Oedipus would not have committed terrible deeds and Narcissus would not have been killed by his own beauty . . . but could all this ever have happened?
Stefano Spera’s works reveal to all of us the complexity of our thinking and shine a light on the need to recognise our prejudices—not to proceed towards their total eradication, but rather towards a continuous and exhausting search for minimal truths. It invites us to embrace a position where our desires not being realised is not something unfavourable, but rather a creative movement allowing and encouraging us to seek something new and better, knowing that it will never result in a final, perfect, absolute map, but only an educated inspired sketch. Waiting for something not to be realised is a state of mind that challenges humanity’s false desire for quick answers which can obscure the complexity of reality. Designing and perfecting a technology that can create images for us seems to be the great dream and promise of modern science, taking humanity back to when men made sacrifices to the gods, invoking the oracle to know the future. Putting calculation and prediction together in the same basket and trusting them blindly can be a dangerous combination. On the other hand we can find a fertile alchemy in knowing and recognising that our knowledge is fortunately always partial, that it is influenced by unforeseen, always new, partly invisible and inexplicable events, which can sometime be fathomed, but not always, using calculation through certain works of art.
I personally believe that Stefano Spera has succeeded in this task, he has left each of us the space and curiosity to discover a series of anchor points within the stratification of his pictorial action, with all its many tiny details. This helps prevent us drifting from our state of being simultaneously sophisticated and full of shortcomings.
—Stefano Monti
at SMDOT/Contemporary Art, Udine
until December 30, 2023