The first section of our exhibition is dedicated to a reflection on the void. A topic long debated during the history of humankind, it was initially deemed a philosophical question and only much later a scientific matter. Atomistic philosophers opened to the possibility of emptiness existing in the interaction area of atoms as early as the VII century BC; however, Thales and Aristotles’ vision of nature abhorring vacuums dominated for two thousand years, declaring the void could not exist. After being ontologically dismissed, we have to wait until the XVI-XVII century for this debate to be concrete again; in Galileo Galilei’s time, the idea appeared that a particular form of emptiness might be created by removing all the air from a location. The later history of the void is strictly connected to modern physics and the evolution of studies related to atoms and the universe. Those same papers and theories still move our contemporary reflections on the origin of matter, feeding the fire of contemporary Art and Science. What is inside the atom and between an electron and the other? What is an electromagnetic field? Can it be considered a form of “void” in its own way? The first two rooms present a series of works by authors, mainly painters, who operated at different times using the same principle of extreme reduction and invisibility, recounting the void as an imaginative dimension, ideal or conceptual. The exhibition path opens with some artworks that, starting from the Fifties, dialogued with the dimension of whiteness and the minimally perceptible. Forcing the limits of abstraction towards the boundaries of immateriality, they grew along the research on visual perception in the context of Programmed Art and Minimalism.
Void - Room 1