Craig Davies for Art-Sheep
Οne of the most significant contemporary artists, Anish Kapoor, returns to Italy with Descension, an exhibition designed for the former cinema and theatre space of Galleria Continua in San Gimignano. At the old wooden floor of the stalls area, beats Descension, the site-specific project of Kapoor and heart of the whole show.
The work is basically a mysterious vortex of ominous black water, that seems to endlessly draining into a timeless and space-less void. “All my life I have reflected and worked on the concept that there is more space than can be seen, that there are void spaces, or, as it were, that there is a vaster horizon. The odd thing about removing content, in making space, is that we, as human beings, find it very hard to deal with the absence of content. It’s the horror vacui. This Platonic concept lies at the origin of the myth of the cave, the one from which humans look towards the outside world. But here there is also a kind of Freudian opposite image, that of the back of the cave, which is the dark and empty back of being. Your greatest poet, Dante, also ventured into a place like that. It is the place of the void, which paradoxically is full – of fear, of darkness. Whether you represent it with a mirror or with a dark form, it is always the “back”, the point that attracts my interest and triggers my creativity,” shared the artist.
The show ran from February 5 to May 9, 2015
