ENTER THE VOID

"What is unseen does not disappear. It sinks. And from there, it continues to exist." 

18.09.2025 

The void is not silence. It is a dark breath that pulses beneath the skin of things, a heartbeat that never stops. It is not lack, it is not absence: it is a dense, mute presence, perceivable only when one closes their eyes and lets themselves fall into it. Everything we believe to be stable hangs suspended over this chasm. A gap that attracts and terrifies.

Those who approach the edge know: vertigo is seduction. The body trembles, the breath tightens, the eyes cannot look away from the darkness that calls and the abyss is not only fear: it is pure desire. It is the impulse that drives us to imagine what it means to let go, to ask ourselves who we would be without our boundaries. Nietzsche wrote it: “If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” And in that mutual gaze there is no condemnation, only recognition: what you are and what you could be meet and overlap, then dissolve into a void that is never neutral but a psychotic, lysergic, hallucinatory experience. It is light exploding into a thousand fragments and immediately extinguishing, a vibration passing through the body like an electric shock. It is seeing colors without names, hearing sounds without sources. It is matter bending, time breaking, the self expanding until it is lost. There is no plot, only immersion. No stability, only waves, flashes, pulses and, for a moment, the void becomes neon light that pulses like incandescent veins, becomes a city seen from above like electronic circuits; it transforms into a body detaching from itself, wandering in flows of light like in Gaspar Noé’s psychedelic dream of Tokyo: lights opening like wounds, flashes turning into flesh, consciousness surviving the body only to disintegrate into sparks and shadows.

To enter the void is to let oneself be dismantled. It is like sinking into the ocean while the world dissolves into luminous trails, while darkness ignites visions that do not belong to this world. It is a journey without a guide, where every reference gives way. One descends like the bodies of dead fish, falling toward the seabed and turning into marine snow: fragments sinking, skin turning to dust, bones disintegrating into particles. Yet nothing disappears: every fragment remains, accumulates, becomes part of a new layer of the world. Perhaps we too are made of these invisible sedimentations: remnants of what we have lost, no longer seen, yet continuing to shape our depth.

As one descends, the pressure increases. The void tightens the chest like a fist, silence vibrates like an acidic hum. The sense of space, time, and body is lost. It is both claustrophobia and liberation: like holding your breath until the head bursts into flashes of light. It is feeling annihilated and infinitely alive at the same time. And yet, just when it seems everything is swallowed, a fissure opens. Not salvation, but a blade of light piercing the darkness. A flash burning the eyes, a lightning bolt tearing through the black, revealing that the void is not an end but a passage. Vertigo becomes revelation: to understand that where we thought there was nothing, a primordial energy pulses instead. There, in collapse, there is birth. In dissolving, there is creation.

With “ENTER THE VOID - エンター・ザ・ボイド”, M.A.D.S. Art Gallery invites artists to step into this gap, to immerse themselves unguarded in what escapes the light. Not a refuge, not elsewhere: the void as substance, as invisible flesh that envelops and shapes everything. To give form to what is usually denied, to what remains submerged: lights trembling and extinguishing like incandescent veins, remnants sliding to the seabed and sedimenting like cosmic dust, fragments of self detaching like scales and becoming new matter. Each work will be immersion and fall, passage and transfiguration: an attempt to translate into images, sounds, and matter that suspended moment in which the world dissolves, and precisely in that dissolution reveals its secret strength. It is an invitation to go beyond the surface, to be swallowed by the abyss, and to discover that what we thought absence is, instead, full presence. That darkness is not empty, but teeming with possibilities. That silence is not an end, but a primordial vibration. Artists, at this threshold, will be explorers of the invisible: cartographers of the unseen, archaeologists of the unsaid, alchemists of the unformed.

"Because the void is not the opposite of life.

It is its most intense radiation.

It is the heartbeat that remains when everything else collapses.

It is what devours us.

And, at the same time, what generates us." 

Concept by Lisa Galletti Senior Art Curator