VERKLARTE NACHT

A similar space-time suspension surrounds the work of Jonathan Ryan, who depicts a terraced landscape under a starry sky, a desert area with no men nor women. The fictional landscape of Emerald Mesa is a metaphysical and tactile place, with its grainy texture due to the use of sand mixed with oil painting. The fields are tidy and green, the land is lush as if someone had taken care of it every day, until the sun goes down. In this sleeping landscape, only the moon moves and vibrates reflecting itself in small water mirrors. The plays of reflections create an ambiguous dimensional shifting between sky and ground surface, and from the aerial perspective the green hill rather looks like a satellite sailing through space.
Alexis Jang instead, with her vivid and bright painting, creates surrealistic nocturnes whit strange figure indiscreetly peering into viewer’s eyes. In Four Clouds the feline gaze, with its ability to see in the dark, recalls the lines of a poem by Charles Baudelaire (Le Fleurs du Mal), who wrote that cats can “sift the silence and the most frightening darkness”, a metaphor for intellectuals and poet as stealthy watcher of contemporary life; in Windswept Bonnet the artist suggests the principle of the human-nature symbiosis, which begins with the metamorphosis of a woman into a wind-rocked cypress. Once again everything is possible overnight, and the boundaries between imagination and reality are blurred.

In the end, this symbiosis process ends up with the dissolution of the figurative language into the whirling and subtle strands of Sasha Ferrè’s painting. In the work Fluence (Blue), the artist seems to dissect the night atmosphere into tiny particles, as if she were looking through the darkness with a microscopic and yet cosmic gaze. Ferrè seeks the heart of dimness trying to reach, in the depth of night, that moment when things – human kind, plant and animal species – are tied and intertwined together over time. Artist’s depiction of night is a sequence of bursts of lights and shadows which evoke the night swarming of life, as life itself is never still and silent. No matter what it’s quivering beneath the painting: things are misleading in the “transfigured night”. The works on display, diverse in pictorial and iconographic choices, reframe and update a classic theme such as the nocturne, rethinking plenty of ancient and modern references. The exhibition is therefore conceived as a score full of counterpoints in dialogue with the intricate movements of Schönberg’s symphony and with the imaginative verses by Dehmel. Music, poetry and painting, for one mysterious hymn to the night. The artists, then, like the poets in Heidegger’s thought, lie awake in the night of the world and in the silence of the images, little sparks in the dark.