Chiara Capellini’s exhibition Dialogo in Silenzio (Dialogue in Silence) is articulated within the consecrated spaces of the Church of San Bernardino alle Monache, presenting itself as a silent conversation between the visitors, the works and the sacredness of the place. The disposition of the paintings – which show their backs to the entrance – combined with the observer’s need to turn his back to the altar in order to look at the painted surfaces, produces a confrontation between spirituality and artistic creativity, which is to be resolved through silence.
The choice to paint works that don’t represent anything and don’t seek the figurative, but focus on actions such as putting on and taking off colors, assimilates the act of painting and its result to a sort of meditation. In this way, the installation becomes an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between art and spirituality through a meditation on emptiness. The silence that surrounds the installation is the tool that helps us to get in contact with the nothingness, with the unknown.
“I have always tried to understand the imagination.
Where is it formed? Are there places, images or situations in which it is facilitated? While researching, I have found that, in chaos, the mind tries to put things in order; creatively it proposes formal solutions to what is undefined, as if it is forced to solve an unclear vision.
Standing and observing chaos being slightly organized into possible forms reminds me of the moment before the meditation, when the mind tries to remove thoughts, remove forms that become images. It is a calm but full and deep place. The mind is active, seeking, but slightly, as when we slowly focus on looking at a landscape. There are no formed thoughts, no philosophies, people or meanings, only a present observation.
Standing and observing as if lost in the fog without giving oneself an explanation; passing between abstract and figurative, between image and color, between the meaningful and the nothing, destroying and recreating images without judgment, and continuing to choose or not to choose. This, I think, is the place of imagination, where I don’t know and I search without having to give explanations.”
–Chiara Capellini
