‘Alternative Dimensions’ NFT Collection - "EGO" IN "YOU"
Breezy is curating the ‘Alternative Dimensions’ NFT-Collection for the ArtTech platform V-Art and the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum. Each week we will present one of the museum's masterpieces involved in the project through articles dedicated to deepening the theme of the preservation of memory and its historical-artistic testimonies.
In this life, we are just passing through. Brief, shining glimmers destined to fade, bodies exposed to the inevitable corrosive action of time. In the cyclical alternation of the seasons, we are footprints on Earth: more or less visible traces in the memory of those who shared part of their journey with us. In rare cases, a virtuous life is remembered for generations, its story handed down, and its legacy becomes the heritage of humanity. In even more exceptional cases, souls of indescribable sensitivity and complexity, the artists, capture the fragilities of their own time or step into the depths of an uncertain future. The artists challenge the present time to reach into the future, often relying on material media and artistic techniques that are less persistent than their ideas. Yet our need to feel part of a larger design and not lonely, accidental souls makes a strong case for preserving memory, in all its manifestations, by seeking confrontation and dialogue with the past.
Do we still recognize ourselves in art history? Can we sustain a gaze and allow ourselves to look without shame? And to reach out to almost forgotten memories? Are we still able to embrace and allow ourselves to be embraced? Do we have sufficient respect for the earth we tread and all its invisible footprints?
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 - 1669), Sketches of the Heads, Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum
"EGO" IN "YOU"
The face of a human being, as a rule, says more interesting things than his mouth says: since it may the face is the compendium of everything the mouth ever says.
Arthur Schopenhauer
And if we tried to shift the center of gravity of memory from our "Ego" to take on the role of the observer? We found that our nature rarely matches appearance. Or rather, life slips fast enough to prevent the other from taking the right time to observe how much of us transpire on the outside.
It is in art that these "natural times" are restored: from the conception to the preparatory study, up to the action, the artist comes into contact with the intimacy of the subject in front of him. He fills his eyes with it in the laying sessions and evokes the image in his memory, often crossing the boundary between the sensible world and the intelligible world. According to Plato, the first would represent the space of becoming and change; the other plane of ideas, from which true knowledge derives and where inspiration and creativity, intuition and genius reside. The temporal dimension of ideas is a succession of fleeting or persistent thoughts and emotions, which we often fail to grasp. To harness an idea we have to write it down, give it body, transpose it from the transcendent to the immanent. In this, the drawing is perhaps the most authentic representation: an immediate synthesis or a quick note destined for subsequent developments, the simplification of the gaze on everything that surrounds us, or the recognition of the essential.
The drawing re-educates us, therefore, to the genuineness of the eye in all possible directions: towards nature, towards things and, last but not least, towards the other. In the portrait, then, a further passage takes place: the sensitivity of the observer enters into a relationship with that of the observed, so that "Ego" and "You" merge and merge into a single entity. This game of exchanges often collides with ethical-social limits, which have repressed this flow in the name of standardized representations that have transmitted us nothing but habits and customs of the time.
How to recreate sincerity in this relationship between the observed and the observer? Many artists believe that the answer lies in the superimposition of the two points of view, that is in the portrait, or in fleeting sketches stolen from the street and from everyday life. No expectations to be met, other than their own, or external stresses or pressures. Scrolling through the pages of art history, few as Rembrandt Van Rijn have worked on the portrait and even fewer have collected so many representations of himself: his face is known from twelve drawings, thirty etchings and over forty paintings, neither commissioned nor addressed to wealthy patrons, but executed for himself. At first he represents himself with clothes and tinsel, staging his personal Carnival in which the artist imagines himself as a soldier, beggar, prince and even king, and then sheds conventional symbols and focuses on the face, which in old age will be crossed by melancholy and restlessness .
The gaze towards the other betrays his inner system, his own sensitivity and the spirit of Dutch society. His works give voice to a brilliant and enterprising era, populated by individuals who have taken their destiny in hand, while others have limited themselves to observing at the side of the road. Let's imagine that these drawing essays are the result of a walk in the market, of an imaginative reconstruction or of a study session for the realization of a work on commission, in which female and male figures alternate, faces more or less crossed by the signs of aging. Photographic memory of time or the artist's memory.
Or rather, a fragment of history that has come down to us through the gesture of a great artist.
Serena Nardoni, Art Historian and Editor
