The Elephant and the Blind Men – The Matter of the Void

Programma espositivo a cura di Zuecca Projects in occasione della 60. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – La Biennale di Venezia.

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The exhibition THE ELEPHANT AND THE BLIND MEN – The Matter of the Void, organized by ZUECCA PROJECTS in collaboration with Rupture Arts & Books, presents a selection of artworks by Chiara Capellini, as the culmination of the artist’s research and meditation on the concept of emptiness and indeterminacy in physics.

The exhibition will take place from April 18 to June 29, 2024, at the Rupture Arts & Books bookshop in Venice, coinciding with the opening of the Biennale Arte 2024. The exhibition will include a selection of books (the main source of the artist’s research) in dialogue with the artworks on display – paintings and sculptures – along with a video interview and the resulting book “questions about nothingness” of the conversation between the artist and the theoretical physicist John Ellis. Following the Venice event, the project will also be presented at the Rupture bookshop in Paris and Marseille.

The journey that led the artist to conceive and realise the exhibition “The Elephant and the Blind Men” began with her meeting in Beaune, France, with John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN. During this meeting, Ellis wore a jumper embroidered with a physical equation relating to the Standard Model and the Theory of Everything. The conversation and readings resulting from this meeting led Chiara to explore the parallelism between quantum physics and art, focusing her attention and creation on the concept of void and interpreting it through a series of different media.

The exhibition is named after an ancient parable about a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal’s body and, based on their limited experience, describes the animal in different ways. To have different points of view on something and to look for parallels helps to have a better understanding of the whole thing. thing. For the artist, this parable embodies the idea that we are blind to the truth of the universe because we can’t see the entire elephant, and we don’t have a complete idea of what we are touching.

On show, two different series of paintings to evoke the transition from macro to micro: the multi-coloured series “VACUUM FIELDS”, and the monochrome “NEUTRINI”. “VACUUM FIELDS” focuses on the feeling of ‘almost emptiness’, on the uncertainty of matter and its constantly evolving state. “NEUTRINI” are monochrome oils on canvas where the paint is scratched in search of imperceptible flaws in its background: the scratches have removed the pigment, leaving a sign without matter.

Alongside the paintings, the first piece from the series of sculptures “THE FOURTH DIMENSION” realized in collaboration with Murano glass-makers, that represents the hypothetical fourth dimension of the expanding universe, the universes that will collapse in on themselves, becoming closed, and those that will continue to expand forever, becoming open.

A neon work, titled “BEFORE ONE”, represents the approximate age of the universe according to the Big Bang theory, which is believed to have originated about 13.8 billion years ago. The neon numbers are moving away from each other, just as our universe is expanding. A video projection of the interview between Capellini and Ellis is also part of the exhibition.

All the artworks included in the exhibition, along with the selection of the books, are conceived as a unique and total work of art.