Artworks always have something paradoxical about them: at their inception, they fix their position in space and time, as if they were boats marking a point on navigational routes. Thus, they are expressions of geography and history, as these spatio-temporal coordinates have contributed to their creation.
The experiences of the individual creator of the work, who has translated ideas and thoughts into an object using tools and materials, are inevitably steeped in an epochal and territorial culture.
However, precisely because of their identity as significant objects, artworks continue to interact with the places and times that host them, becoming a part of them. They find a homeland in every space and in all times they come into contact with, continuing to release their meanings in any present, in each latitude. In this ‘active persistence’, they accumulate further and always new meanings.
A painting, perhaps originally intended for a 17th-century Italian church and now located in a Californian museum, retains the sense of its origin. Museum visitors may not know its history, but the object certainly continues to possess it, and in any case, that painting will never cease to tell different stories to everyone. Its narrative, tied to a remote time and distant geography, can sometimes become enigmatic like the words of a sibyl. Yet, even due to the mystery surrounding the words and images, it becomes charged with new and infinite prophecies, which end up connecting to our present, speaking to us about today, about us. Therefore, the work is perpetually contemporary, and its evocative nature places it in dialogue with other significant objects, producing inexhaustible stories of relationships.
For this reason, there are artworks that, being born today, establish a singular relationship with stories and geographies different from their own. The paradox of relationships can thus be specular, and sometimes the dialogue with the past and the remote is established even without explicit intention, through the crossing navigational routes that exchange signals and codes, more or less encrypted.
It is really difficult to identify an art that does not arise from past art, that escapes a pre-existing alphabet, that no longer hears the echo of past voices, but it is equally rare to find artists who make this dialogue through time a natural statute, a true poetic program.
Timelessness aims to be a laboratory for researching these connections, following the routes of great art cruisers we would then like to host unpredictable dialectical forms between the past and the present, between the near and the remote.
