Different Looks

28 January 2025Reviews

by Raffaella Pulejo
Course Director Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices
Brera Academy, Milano

The idea that the “new” constitutes the main quality of contemporary art, and that it is in a state of perpetual disjuncture with the past, is a misleading notion. For centuries, and before the artistic avant-garde revolution of the twentieth century, it was the repetition of established, canon-based models that held the stage and constituted the core of teaching in academies of fine art. But even when in modernity artists have subverted such canons, reciting the form in a language sometimes challenging for the public, the connection of art with the scientific knowledge of its time has never been broken. A contemporary work of art, said the artist Luciano Fabro, rewrites the whole history of art of the past, and always binds itself to a genealogy by renewing its ideas in the present. Examples of the relationships between art and science throughout Western art history are constant, to the point that it could be said that no art form is imaginable away from the scientific and technological knowledge that characterizes every civilization. Even the perfect ideal beauty of the masterpieces of classical art, which so ‘easily’ seduces us, was based on the mathematical proportions of the golden ratio, and the harmonic relationships that Greek philosophers believed governed nature and the entire cosmos.

Those harmonic relations were for example expressed, or rather revealed, by musical proportions, as the string resonated harmonically according to precise measures. At the origins of knowledge, art and science, philosophy and music, ‘resonated’ with each other. As such they resonate with that inner music, resonance of larger spaces, an echo of the harmonic skeleton, Ale Guzzetti’s Il bosco delle Ninfe (The forest of the nymphs), awakens such notions, if only we move close to them.

The extensive exhibition presents over forty years of Ale Guzzetti’s work and is promoted by the Municipality of Saronno, hosted in the three venues of Sala Nevera, Spazio UFO, and Galleria il Chiostro, and realised in collaboration with the students of the Visual cultures and curatorial practices course at the Brera Academy. Ale Guzzetti was among the first in Italy to devote himself to the relationship between art and new technologies, with a particular focus on the new interaction that digital devices offer us. That technology that might seem distant, already innervates our daily lives and characterises itself as a new prosthesis of our own bodies: we hold in our hands – literally on our bodies – smartphones, which are only the most visible and widespread of the devices that have become a necessary part of our existence. So there is nothing alien about the figures that, consigned to us by classicism, Ale Guzzetti contaminates with technologies familiar to us, grafted onto inert matter that comes alive, reacting to our presence, stimulated by our gaze and our movement. From the classical canon, through the Renaissance autómata, to robots and artificial intelligence, the dream of sculpture since the earliest times has been to replicate life. The “power of images” as the scholar David Freedberg would say, is based on their active nature to solicit the desire and imagination of the spectator, who in turn performs, in place of the inert image, the missing act of perceiving its living presence. This is the mechanism as much in erotic images, that evoke desire, as in sacred ones, that embody the divine, in front of both, the spectator is stirred towards the desire to touch, to kiss, and to respond to the call.1

Ale Guzzetti’s sculptures, embedded with digital images, are part of this long artistic genealogy, they draw from it the archetypal power of attraction over our senses, and before the electronic blinking of their eyelids has chance to stir a sense of unease within us, they question us about the nature of the world we inhabit, so that we might take nothing for granted, and our gaze might remain attentive. And why not, also dreamy.