From Friday 13 to Sunday 16 May Spazio Nour is hosting Marco Mariani's solo exhibition: Luce, Diffrazioni, Trasparenze curated by the Bice Bugatti Club. Marco Mariani's research, which has always been on the borderline between artistic experimentation and scientific research, stems from the artist's desire to explore the properties of matter through the use of light. His research revolves around concepts such as the relationship between nature-energy, matter-light, interaction, origin and form. By analysing the effects of light on manipulated matter, he arrives at the appearance of the hidden but intrinsic form of the phenomenon itself. For Mariani, science and art are not opposing categories but, on the contrary, are linked to the same objective: to probe and explore the Real. Through his work, Mariani has taken a precise position, that of being opposed to the clear break that has occurred in the modern era between Art (understood in the broadest sense of humanistic culture) and Science, and through his poetics and research he agrees with Charles Percy's opinion, offering his commitment to a "reconciliation" between the two worlds, since the lack of dialogue between the two disciplines has impoverished the world of culture in general. There are many important examples of the happy union and collaboration between Art and Science that have accompanied the history of mankind since the classical age, including the fruitful period of the Italian Renaissance. It is evident how the work of Leonardo da Vinci manifests a profound correspondence between Art and Science, as does the work of Filippo Brunelleschi, the Florentine architect-scientist, whose entire artistic, architectural and theoretical oeuvre can be translated as a search for geometric relationships that led to the birth of perspective. Similarly, the dialogue between Art and Science constitutes, for Mariani, a central aspect of his artistic and aesthetic research, oriented towards the knowledge of the properties and forms of matter, understood here as the fundamental presupposition of the very existence of art. For the artist, light becomes the instrument that allows a special kind of exploration, offering the visible aspects and forms that are usually not perceptible to the naked eye. A flow of light rays coming from an extremely powerful artisanal projector, built and designed by the artist himself, thanks to a system of lenses can enlarge, focus and project the images of some plexiglass plates previously manipulated by the artist. These works are then, thanks to the use of light, refracted and diffracted. The work is completed with the projection of large and suggestive shapes, which are nothing but the image of what is intrinsic in the material itself, understood here as mutable and transformative energy. With this work, Marco Mariani succeeds in making the micro and the macro coexist on the same surface and, as Teodosio Martucci, a careful exegete of Mariani's work, has written: "The artist, emancipating himself from the mythology of the demiurge, becomes rather a sort of sensitive manipulator of matter with all its implications of colour, light and space".
