Berty Skuber: a Labyrinth of Particulars. The Artistic Work from the Beginning Until Today

The final goal of Berty Skuber’s artistic work is to escape from confusion and approach clear thinking. The world and life are constantly characterized by noise, uproar, and above all by the inability of the human being to understand and grasp everything that surrounds him, such as the world in its totality. As a conscious being, however, man cannot help but question himself, and seek the truth, a way towards understanding himself and the universe. Berty Skuber carries on this research through her work, defined by herself as a Labyrinth of Details, in which she sees the best way to get as close as possible to the longed-for truth. This labyrinth is indeed formed based on her experience of herself and the world around her.

Making art means investigating the surrounding world: a type of investigation that the artist recognizes as something that endures, that does not have an end. For the artist, this type of investigation is comparable to an enormous labyrinth which, like life itself, is dotted with unique and incomparable paths, i.e. the particulars. In her art, the construction and the labyrinths themselves are something that takes place for the most part in the artist’s mind, thus going to demonstrate how this labyrinthine research and construction is purely a mental work.
Her work indeed takes its cue from what happens in her mind, where the labyrinth begins to build itself, and only later the images and details that appear in the artist’s psyche are translated onto sheets of paper.

Starting from the assumption that art is an ongoing but obscure investigation of the universe, the artist’s labyrinth is made of uncertainties, veiled images, unspoken words, and missing connections. All these mysterious elements are used by the artist to try to understand something more about the world around her simply to find a way out of confusion, an experiment in clear thinking. Skuber searches for and finds this clarity of thinking through implicit connections between two objects or, even better, between two particulars. The particulars in her pieces try to find a relationship and a connection with other particulars as if they were two objects of the same nature that forcefully attract each other. It is precisely through these connections between particulars that one can arrive at grasping the very essence of the particular and, only after having achieved this understanding, is it possible to arrive at the knowledge of the whole, of the totality of which the particular is a part. As Berty Skuber once said: “The understanding of the particular precedes the understanding of the whole, and the experience of the particular precedes the intuition of the whole.”