SECRETS 2023

 

International Contemporary Art exhibition

2023 SEPTEMBER, 14th

Concept by Art Curator Mara Cipriano

Truth is revealed by time, this is what one of Bernini's most famous sculptures teaches. Before we come to the fatal confrontation with Kronos, however, we jealously guard our secrets like precious gems. Just like Melusina: a sublime-looking mythological woman with a terrible secret.

Ruggiero is enchanted by his wife's marvellous appearance but is consumed with curiosity to discover why the woman, once a week, asks to be left alone. Intrigued and jealous, he bursts in while the woman is bathing, on the day of the week when he is forbidden to look at her. He surprises her in the bath: instead of legs Melusina has a fish tail. The woman's bestial nature terrifies him, and their relationship is permanently destroyed.

Saved and feared, secrets are both extremely fragile and powerful, they are impetuous. King Midas, known for being condemned to turn objects into gold, hides, in classical myth, donkey ears under a headdress. The only one who knows of this physical bizarreness concealed from the world is his barber. The man just cannot keep quiet and digs a hole in the ground and then shouts into it these words: "King Midas has donkey ears!". Apollo, realising the gesture, makes reeds grow over that hole, which, moved by the wind, repeat the barber's phrase and it spreads throughout the world.

Secrets are barriers against the outside world, let us imagine for a moment the consequences on our lives if we made public our every mistake, prejudice, desire, habit, ambition. We would be naked and alone. In a world that is highly inclined to externality and sharing, it would be unreasonable not to consider keeping a secret as a skill or virtue, that intrinsic and peculiar capacity for self-control that leads one to draw a deep line between what must appear and what must remain hidden. Secrets offer us the advantage of being free to explore who we are and manipulate our image for public consumption. They are a necessary social cover.

It would be wise to realise that the shadow, rather than swallowing up the light, dances with it in a fascinating and necessary play of light and dark. The secret-knowledge relationship also takes on epistemological significance in the symbolism that encompasses both the capacity to conceal and to reveal. Secrets make our lives poetic; they make the work of artists poetic. Think of artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci or Vincent Van Gogh, the vibration of colours, the decisiveness or delicacy of the strokes, the lines, the choice of a particular subject, the expressive charge, all leave traces of the secrets of the soul.

Art is not exhausted in its creation but is preserved in minor details. To understand the richness of artistic works means to be far-sighted, to look beyond the canvas, to unearth appearances. Therefore, the international art gallery M.A.D.S. invites artists to hover between the said and the unsaid, the represented and the unrepresented. M.A.D.S. invites artists to let their personalities seep out through the not immediately explicit communicative medium of art and to leave us spectators with the curiosity to understand the hidden truths.