‘Alluring shapes, tempting spaces’

Where the I-world relationship, understood as a nucleus of phenomenological thinking, takes on the character of intentionality, it becomes necessary to investigate pure consciousness that allows the realisation of the totality of subjective and world experience. The German word Erlebnis, translated with the expression “lived  experience” or “living” indicates the personal and unitary aspect for which the contents of consciousness are not passively taken but acquired in a living way in the flow of it. Because of its dynamic nature, Erlebnis has been considered to be the essential condition for capturing all that is life, whether it is the individual, historical, artistic, religious, etc. which escape the purely definitive methods of natural sciences.

And so it is in sharp contrast with certain positivistic reductions that consider this relationship as a simple physiological, mechanical and associative process. As Edmund Husserl states,the crisis of science comes from the fact that the original sense of experience has been lost, that is, the intuitive experience of the world of life which is the perceived perceptual world.

Far from any associative and behaviorist setting and out of psychic content, this kind of subjectivity of personal experience is ideally oriented to investigate, shape, and define the identity of the image as a way to reconfigure our sensory experience of vision.

Such an experiential approach is perhaps the ideal one to take in front of a work and what appears to in play in “Alluring shapes, tempting spaces” is the experience of a series of references to Erlebnis, an internal game between the works on display, an Erlebnis ping-pong, as if the hand had disappeared before completing the form or even as if it had never disappeared while keeping it in the hollow of a space that becomes hostile: this makes these figures, perpetually in tension (Tempting), exhaling a stimulating (Alluring) past experience but still in the itinerary.

The presence of iconic elements and recognisable cultural references emphasises such an approach as it marks the difference betweenprocedural experience and possible pre-established schemes, denouncing the flow of Erlebnis outside these.

The central pivot of this thematic constellation is the question of the relationship between the formal and material components of the cognitive process that evolves from the binomial into a single sensorial experience.

– Domenico de Chirico, Mai 2017

Curated by: Domenico de Chirico

Artists: Adriano Amaral, Gabriele Beveridge, Nicolas Boulard, Manuel Burgener, Adriano Costa, Michel de Broin, François Durel, Rubén Grilo, Andy Meerow, Oren Pinhassi and Gerda Scheepers.