A Landscape of Glass
Le sculture di Vistosi vanno viste tutte insieme. Insieme infatti danno vita ad un paesaggio ed è di questo paesaggio che intendo parlare.
Vistosi’s sculptures should be viewed as a whole. Together, they create a landscape, and it is this landscape that I wish to discuss.
It is, in fact, the landscape that Vistosi brings to life, a transfigured landscape, or rather a landscape that balances between reality and dreams, between concreteness and escapism.
The ancient Greeks called this configuration between reality and dream a phantom form, present but on the verge of vanishing, almost an intermediate stage between solid and fluid.
And it is between solid and fluid that the material used by Vistosi, glass, also lies.
They are Vistosi’s forms of ancestral abstraction, almost amniotic.
They allude to an ineffable world that is constantly on the verge of enveloping us. A magical reality, therefore, that dresses itself in dreams to appear dreamlike. Those who first investigated this form of reality, which is always about to vanish like the cat in Alice in Wonderland, were the Romantics, more precisely the early German Romantics of Jena.
They were not irrational, quite the contrary. They had in fact been educated on Kant’s revolutionary writings and precisely.
Kant had taught them that perception of reality corresponds to reality itself. Novalis, the most poetic and gifted among them, understood that this ability to give form to reality is the characteristic and destiny of man, and that this characteristic defines his highest nature, namely his aesthetic nature. Novalis’ programme, therefore, his aesthetic revolution, was intended to draw out in man that ability to give life to representations and forms capable of expressing human sensitivity to its fullest potential, that is, those in which that unfathomable transcendent something within us becomes visible, at least for a moment, in a true epiphany.
This would only have been possible through a process of transfiguration, that is, the moment when what is real becomes unreal, when what is immanent becomes transcendent, only to return to being real, immanent and tangible form. Ultimately, it is the moment when form is in limbo, as if a metamorphosis were frozen halfway through a hybrid state: in a state of suspension, so to speak. Vistosi’s sculptures are suspended and transfigured; as such, through empathy, they stimulate us to dream of reality in order to transfigure it, if only to make it, as Baudelaire wanted, a little more acceptable: to make it better. It seems to me that this is the message that Vistosi’s sculptures intend to convey, a message of trust in man, if only for his rare ability to transfigure reality. But transfiguration is also a technique.
Novalis wrote, for example: ‘By giving the commonplace a lofty meaning, the familiar a mysterious aspect, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance, I make them romantic.’ Transfiguration, therefore, cannot start from the bizarre, from the little known; in order to work, it needs to start from the known, indeed from the most known and accessible possible, even from the commonplace and the ordinary. It needs to start from heads, from the sun, from the flight of birds, from dances, from waves, from warriors, all titles of Vistosi’s dreamy and romantic sculptures, works which, like those of high romantic quality, have the ability to interpose themselves not only between reality and unreality, but also between the world of their author and that of all of us.
Valerio Paolo Mosco
Professor of Architectural Theory – IUAV – Venice