Jade Vlietstra

15/05/2024
Arte nel Paesaggio, Fluctuation, 2023
The aim of Arte nel Paesaggio is to promote contemporary art in the landscape, landscape that is seen as a monument to human endeavour. We are proud of man’s work here in this land of extraordinary beauty and harmonious interaction.

Art and Landscape in symbiosis produce emotion, feelings that are not bound by individual experience: our goal is to bring into focus the system of relationships between man and the land he inhabits.
I believe strongly in an approach to the emotions based on perception and on the genuine human qualities of respect, understanding and wisdom in order to bring forth an enriched appreciation that becomes embedded in the collective consciousness.
The complex rapport between man and nature has been studied in modern times from the angle of mechanisation and technological innovation, often with the objective of dominating nature. This progress has ignored human well-being and its effects are fully apparent: climate change, and air and land pollution that have lead to widespread ecological disaster.
The artistic elaboration of the landscape sharpens our powers of observation, renews out vision of the world, enhances the value of nature and brings us closer to the scientific thought that guided Leonardo, who was both scientist and artist, and who humbly described himself as an unlettered man ‘omo sanza lettere’. His method was based on direct experience, the synthesis of art and science, and on his extraordinary capacity to observe the metabolic phenomena of life and the resurgence of nature, memorising its matrixes.

The site-specific installation Waterbones by Loris Cecchini at the Polyfunctional Observatory in the Chianti (OPC), a site of scientific activity, is coordinated by the University of Florence department of Physics and Astronomy, in cooperation with the Department of Earth Sciences, and the Laboratory of Experimental Geo Physics and LaMMA.
The choice of the Observatory was determined by the artist’s interest in the observatory as a centre of active study, of research and of observation of the sky and of the celestial bodies in the cosmos.
Cecchini’s modular installations, in their assembly, are surprisingly similar to complex dynamic systems, composed of a concatenation of interconnected steel elements. Each individual module is connected to the next allowing it to rotate and therefore change. The work contains a series of parameters with their own variables and appears as a whole, as a fluctuation, as a metaphor of different dynamics, such as the movements of flocks of birds, the interconnection of social systems or the cerebral synaptic structure.
These complex dynamic systems are relationships composed of multiple parts interacting among themselves producing behaviour said to be constantly emerging, in a manifestation of the global as opposed to the individual.

The study of the balance within nature is the concern of many artists, the Argentinian Tomás Saraceno among them. His work investigates the makeup of cosmic macro structures and natural micro systems. The German artist, Christiane Loehr, creates delicate structures with blades of grass, plant stems, flowers and seeds, built from the many pieces she has gathered in simulation of the tiniest geometric order found in nature. The Brazilian Ernesto Neto feels that he is engaged in an energetic connection with humanity and finds sacrality in plants, animals, insects and in every living creature . He explores the border between social and physical space using complex interactive, tactile and olfactory structures.

The modular installation Waterbones - which for the artist remains in the realm of sculpture- and in its structure conjures an impression of rustling, of swarming, of shoaling, of self-organizing behaviours: these follow peculiar rules in the absence of a focal point and a centralized hierarchy.
This behaviour is at the basis of evolution and species adaptation, but also more recently, is evident in the dynamics of artificial intelligence. For example, with shoaling, schools of fish on the surface, united briefly by their swift movements, form both a defensive and evolutionary system allowing the shoal in the event of an attack, to engage in a collective and coordinated deeper immersion, so producing large protective waves on the surface of the water. In nature groups that interact succeed in developing a collective intelligence, not determined so much by individual ability as by the communicative powers and interaction of the group with its environment.
Looking at Cecchini’s installations, we are no longer able to distinguish the difference between the single parts and the whole in a combination of elements that is both chaotic and symmetrical. The complexity at work and the creative act are connected to chaos, in subtle mechanisms that make apparent ordered phenomena within chaotic systems.

In Arte nel Paesaggio, Loris Cecchini works in symbiosis with the place and the environment. His work reveals itself and is determined by its surroundings and the host architecture and, in its turn, interacts and shapes the whole with the dynamic qualities of the language of art.