AS IT CHANGES - 移ろいのままに

20.06.2025

Everything changes. Everything shifts. Everything transforms, incessantly.

It is a truth so evident that it becomes almost invisible, yet it is the only constant that accompanies us from beginning to end: nothing remains the same. There is no fixed point, no immobile refuge, no permanent identity. Not even ourselves are who we were a moment ago. We pass through ourselves, we lose ourselves, we recreate ourselves, in the continuous flow of what lives. The law of change is in fact something silent and impartial, something older than thought and more intimate than breath. It asks no consent, it does not slow down out of compassion. It has always accompanied us, yet we only realize it in crucial moments: when something slips away, when a familiar face changes, when the light shifts and we understand that nothing will ever be as it was again. We ourselves are part of this flowing. We are renewing cells, memories that rewrite themselves, emotions that fade, faces that age. We think of ourselves as solid, continuous, coherent. But we are processes. We are oscillations. We are continuous flowing toward entropy. We are fragments of becoming in search of a form that does not exist. And even when we find it, it is already dissolving. And so, in an instant, the wrinkles on our hands change, our desires, the names with which we define ourselves. The voice with which we call love changes, the memory of what we have felt changes. Even the thoughts we consider deepest are subject to change, like the sky above a city that seems always the same yet is never identical to itself. Everything is impermanent, and everything that lives flows, incessantly.

In antiquity, Heraclitus left us a proverb-like image: one never steps twice into the same river.

That is to say, nothing remains identical to itself, neither the waters that flow, nor the one who steps into them. Every instant is new, every encounter has changed. But perhaps, if we look closely, one never steps even once into the river: because time does not even allow the moment of grasp. The instant we recognize something, it has already transformed. And we with it. Art, the face, the word, the memory: everything shapes itself in the current. Everything is touched, smoothed, consumed by time. And so mountains crumble, seasons flow, emotions evaporate. And the illusion of permanence, however refined, remains a fragile defense against the truth of the world. A truth that does not condemn us but awakens us: it is precisely in the delicacy of the moment that its intensity resides. What cannot remain lives more strongly. What dissolves touches us more deeply. Nietzsche spoke of the eternal return as the ultimate test: could we bear to relive every single instant infinitely? But perhaps the real vertigo is not in repetition, but in the awareness that it will never happen again. That what happens does so only once. No gesture repeats in the same way, no kiss has the same temperature, no glance falls twice identical. And maybe it is precisely this that saves us: knowing that beauty is not in eternity, but in the time that is consumed.

What is, ultimately, more beautiful than the shadow that moves dancing with the sun, than a scent that changes its notes over the course of the day, than a flower that falls and in its fall stains the earth with a beauty destined to vanish? There is a concept that embraces this subtle and profound sensitivity: 移ろい (utsuroi). It does not just describe change, but the way things gently drift away from their form, as if time barely brushes them. It is the leaf that lets itself yellow without hurry, the scent that dissolves into the air without asking to be remembered, the color that fades in memory even before disappearing. There is no tragedy in this transformation. Only grace. It does not resist change: it accompanies it, with the same respect with which one accompanies a beloved person to the threshold. Because it is precisely in movement that things reveal themselves. And form, in the end, is nothing but a momentary pause in the flow of the world.

“AS IT CHANGES: 移ろいのままに” is a reflection on the very nature of existence. We are not made to remain, but to pass through. Our identity is not a fixed point, but a passage, a continuous repositioning. Even what appears complete, a work, a thought, a love,  carries within it a subtle vibration of incompleteness, as if everything is still listening, still becoming. This exhibition does not seek permanence, but the truth that reveals itself in movement, in the fragility of forms, in the constant metamorphosis of things. M.A.D.S. Art Gallery invites every artist to engage with this flow, to welcome the passing time, the changing matter, the transforming self. It is not about stopping, but about remaining present. About witnessing, through art, that indefinable moment in which something changes while it is lived, while it is seen, while it is created. Because it is precisely while it changes that life lets itself be glimpsed. Perhaps nothing belongs to us. Not even ourselves. But it is precisely this impermanence that makes everything alive. And, for this alone, worthy of being lived.

Concept by Lisa Galletti Senior Art Curator