Alchimie del mito

An invitation to rediscover art as an entity still capable of constituting, just as it did in ancient cultures, a complex amalgam of spatiality and temporality, symbols and narrations. The mass media are radically transforming the construction of our imagination. Traditional culture and art performed this function by providing a particular ritualization of communication. The vision of a picture or the contemplation of a statue, the reading of the stories carved on a column or those recounted in the pages of a book, capture our attention and are able to make us the gift of concentration. It is an experience in which time comes to a stop and meanings reverberate in us like ancient myths. The state of rapture or meditation into which we are thrown in front of a traditional work of art is close to the modes of sacred and mythological communication. The volume, which accompanies the exhibition at Castelbasso, centers on the complexity of the symbolical dimension and its relationship with myth in contemporary art, investigated through the works of five great artists who stand out for the original way in which they gone back to the use of myth in the ambit of contemporary expression: Marco Gastini, Paolo Icaro, Luigi Mainolfi, Nunzio and Gilberto Zorio take on the spaces of the ancient town (indoors and outdoors) in a confrontation-dialogue that reveals affinities and differences in the conception and use of the concepts of myth and symbol.