What could the complicated neuronal mechanisms be that allow a human being to conceive, mentally elaborate, and then pour onto paper impossible, unthinkable, indecipherable images and figures?
What on earth can happen in the mind when figures, objects, animals materialize that aggregate and immediately afterwards disintegrate, materialize and then vanish?
In the eyes, profane, of those who observe all this, only a sense of admiring and total confusion mixed with infinite admiration remains. The same feeling that can be experienced when approaching the thought, the pencil, the genius. In fact, there are few artists who are allowed to think that “We reproduce spatial illusions as if this had always been the most normal thing in the world. Doesn't it seem absurd to you sometimes to draw a couple of lines and say: this is a house?”
All this can take place in front of the very rich collection – over 200 – of original Dutch engravings Maurice Cornelius Escher exhibited with great care and attention at the PAN -Palazzo delle Arti in Naples.
It is one of the rare times in which an exhibition manages to document and illustrate an artistic journey of this level with a significant amount of documents and original works, further enriched by the influence that Escher's works have had for the generations that have followed in the worlds of graphics, industrial design, cinema. Furthermore, a selection of engravings made during the artist's trip to Italy in 1923 is proposed.
What continues to amaze, to support a strong feeling of stupefaction that is felt in front of Escher's works is not so much and not only his "magic", his ability to propose visual suggestions at the limits of the impossible imaginary conception, but its extraordinary modernity, its total correspondence to the digital world in which we are deeply immersed today.
It almost seems that the Dutch genius had anticipated special effects by a century, the vision of fantastic worlds and objects beyond the likely.
Faced with the impossible stairs, the waterfall, the metamorphosis of faces, one expects them to become animated, that one can suddenly see a movement. The adjectives we have available to describe his works are not enough: it would be like wanting to qualify other peers like Einstein or, before that, Michelangelo. They are visionary men beyond the possible, beyond the human if only it were allowed to be able to say "magnificent" or "fantastic" about them. It would always be too little.
Among the many works exhibited at the PAN we propose one that, in some way, could mark the paradigm not only of his graphic sign but of all the conceptualization of his works: Metaphorphosis II.
This is the well-known engraving (about 4 meters long) made in 1940 where, starting from a word, an evolution of the sign takes place through various subjects until returning to the initial word. In its absolute and total simplicity and essentiality it synthetically represents the very beginning and end of everything that returns to itself, that lives and develops without stopping to then return to its primordial nature. To observe it carefully you need a long gaze, you need to move along its axis, you need to detach your point of view to be fully aware of it. Maybe, just like it happens in the life of each of us.
The exhibition is having an important success and queues form at the box office almost every day. Everything is right: the museum headquarters by now (it began its activities in 2005) has consolidated an experience that places it at the center of attention not only in the city but throughout the national artistic panorama. For those who want to enrich a day in Naples, we suggest a happy and important "minor" stop but of great interest: the church of San Giovanni a Carbonara, an unjustly forgotten Renaissance masterpiece.
The PAN that hosts Escher is located in the eighteenth-century Palazzo Roccella in Via dei Mille n. 60 (INFO AND BOOKINGS: +39 081 1865991 www.mostraescher.it )
But who was it Escher? in a previous article the story of him.
