CELESTIAL MATERIAL considers the harmony and simplicity that exist in the laws of nature, notwithstanding the apparent chaos that governs the universe and our individual lives. What perception do we have of the place in which we live and in what way do we stand in lucid wonder before the sky? Our perception of reality has been filtered by centuries of history and scientific labour that have continually reconditioned our awareness of being here and now in a given space and in a specific time. But what do we really know of ourselves and of what we are made? When matter is broken down into ever smaller particles, we find that its roots lie in mathematical ratios. And yet the world as it is laid out before our eyes is made up of diverse colours and principles, of sounds and sentiments, of shapes and thoughts. Is it really only a question of numbers? The quest for the secrets of the cosmos is an inexhaustible source of questions and answers, which in turn generate ever more complex and impalpable queries. The ultimate truth may never be knowable but our curiosity will always drive us further forward.

This exhibition seeks to depict something of the human soul which never tires of examining its own destiny, whether within or outside itself.

At the height of the splendour of Byzantine art (6th century AD) the skies of paintings and mosaics, exquisitely portraying transcendence, are infused with abstract symbolism, and the spatial relations between the world and its inhabitants tell of the supernatural rather than the natural. Constructed from golden tesserae, the universe is circumscribed by what the human eye is able to see, while the entire world is bathed in the strength and warmth of the sun’s light. Not until the advent of Cimabue do the figures in a painting abandon their fixed gazes and postures and become active participants in the dialogue between the earth and the cosmos. Celestial Material is an exploration of this journey. Our relationship with what surrounds us is constantly evolving but there is no doubt that, for the sciences and, consequently, for our lives, the turning point was the revolutionary shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican view of the universe. No longer at the centre of all existence but relegated to the role of an inhabitant of but one planet among many, Man felt disconcerted and had to face his own weakness, ignorance, and fear. Our planet is just one of many possible (or impossible) worlds, and not even the best of them. So it was that from dominant beings, men were reduced to actors on a much smaller stage than they had imagined.

“Do you hear the delicious harmony which the heavenly bodies produce by their revolutions?” (Moral Dialogues, Dialogue between the Earth and the Moon, Milano, Mondadori, 1979) asks the earth of the moon in the words of Leopardi, which are as relevant now as they were when they were written. For this exhibition, Dania Zanotto has been entrusted with the task of conveying the surprise that these two lords of the creation feel at contemplating each other and realising that they are different but share the same fate of orbiting the sun, joined together by an unbreakable bond. Zanotto, from Treviso, has created a splendid, white installation. Sister moon is a devoted bride who gathers to herself the tears of lovers, the verses of poets, the doubts of philosophers, and the inquisitiveness of scholars. Zanotto’s works are simulacra of the spirit, patiently constructed from resin, glue, stones, metal threads, feathers, sea-smoothed pieces of glass, coral, and pearls. Out of seemingly nothing, she fashions natural fabrics that become the material of shamanic vestments which could have belonged to Greek gods or Arab warlords, to Roman emperors or Inca sovereigns; to the priests of revealed religions or to worshippers of the sun. The universal relevance of these works comes from their gentle but powerful ability to steer us from the earthly to the celestial, from the contingent to the spiritual. Their aptness is all the more striking because their force does not come from their weight but from their lightness. Embroidered and studded with different materials, encrusted with tiny stitches, these garments tell us something about ourselves, but quietly, non-judgementally, and without pointing us in any particular direction.

“Such is life, a fragment of light that ends in the night.” writes Céline in Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932). 

Marco Martelli documents the modern sky. Set against the deep blue of a Lisbon night; the blue veiled by wispy clouds in a Milan autumn; the turquoise of a New York morning; a bright summer’s evening in Turin; the intense cold of a Stockholm day; or a golden sunset in London, sections of buildings rise from the lower corner of Martelli’s esicanvasses and silently challenge our fear of heights. We do not see the buildings in their entirety, or their graceful and rational design. With meticulous precision, Martelli paints only the top storeys of buildings that are symbolic of particular places. But he is not interested in their actual function. It matters little whether the building is a factory or a warehouse, a stately home or a covered market; their function here is to be representative. These shapes, the product of human ingenuity, serve to mark the space in the eternal conflict between occupied and unoccupied areas, between the presence and absence of matter. Painting thus lends itself to an exploration of the metaphysical while at the same time preserving enough magic to make the idea of inevitable finiteness bearable.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more.” (John of Patmos, Apocalypse, 19:7-9; 7:13-17; Ro 8:17-18) 

The Last Judgement, inspired by the lines attributed to John of Patmos, is the fresco that adorns the walls behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo between 1536 and 1541. It is the most spectacular representation there is of parusia, the event of Christ’s last coming at the end of time, and marks a turning point in philosophical thinking. The confident man of  Humanism and the early Renaissance is replaced by a chaotic and delirious perception of a world thrown into tumult by a complete absence of certainty. 

The sculpture entitled Apocalypse, that Padua artist Ettore Greco has created for the exhibition, takes up the theme of that lack of direction and emphasizes the torment of our species which, from the second half of the 16th century, has forced us to look at the sky in a new way. 

The heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (Toruń, 1473 - Frombork, 1543), which places the sun at the centre of its system, overturned the geocentrism that claimed that the Earth was the ruler of the known universe. The Age of Science had begun and the question of cosmology would influence all types of research, including art, from then on. Greco approaches the subject of the desperation of man, on the brink of a chasm of nothingness, by depicting a tangle of men and horses rushing towards an abyss. Evoking the themes of death and eternal damnation that tormented Auguste Rodin (Paris, 1840 - Meudon, 1917) in the creation of his lifework The Gates of Hell, Greco borrows the plasticity of form from his ideal master, but the rhythm of his figures is completely contemporary; in the limbs crushed by and crushing other limbs and in the horses’ kicking hooves we feel the need to escape. What is new here, femminicompared to the existential crisis of the first two decades of the twentieth century, is that man is not even rebelling - he is just frightened. 

“The universe: a device contrived for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.” (Arthur C. Clarke, Vistas in Astronomy, 37, 1993) Science defines life as the achievement of a complex level of organization within a physical system. It is not easy for man to think of himself in these terms. What we know of living beings, and what inter-disciplinary research has measured and counted in real terms of quality and quantity, is limited to the Earth’s biosphere: 350 thousand plant species, 1,200 thousand animal species, 800 thousand of which are insects, as well as 100 thousand microorganisms. And then there is Man, the only species capable of turning its gaze to the heavens. Only man is entitled, with all the fear it entails, to question his place in the universe. This peculiarity requires that a distinction be made between looking and seeing. It is a substantial difference and involves the need to push ever further, not to be satisfied with just staying alive. 

Alberto Salvetti, from Vicenza, has embraced this collection of data and interpreted it on three clay blocks. The artist presents the clay in an almost raw state and imbues it with the Christian theory of creation. He combines the two values of matter and soul through the different qualities inherent to this material: it is endowed with a physical consistency, weight, inertia, and malleability. It can be conceived of as a concrete substratum of objects and substances; as a passive principle when related to shape; or again, as a concept in juxtaposition to the spirit. One clay block features myriad inch-high men - our overpopulated planet seen from space. Another shows the Periodic Table of the Elements with distances of “88 88”, where the elements yet to be discovered in space will be inscribed. The third block is etched with images of animals and plants and begs the question, how much more life exists, beyond the known world?

“This universe has not been made by any god or man but it always has been, is and will be an everliving fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.” (Heraclitus, Fragments) 

The partially formed bodies of the sculptures of Mauro Benatti, the Airuno artist to whom this exhibition is dedicated, were created from the unstable equilibrium that exists between matter, philosophy and the history of art. Stones, iron, paper, and fabric woven from metal wire were the essential ingredients of his airy constructions, made in his studio on the banks of the river Adda, a river which for centuries has inspired the work of artists, from Leonardo to the Lombardy Naturalists to the Arte Informale of Morlotti. Whether working with stone or shaping metal into sinuous female figures inspired by Morlotti’s Bathers, Benatti left no stone unturned. A profound knowledge of his materials and an inexhaustible curiosity about the workings of nature led him to explore the possibilities that fire and its effects on chemical reactions provide for empirical experimentation. And so his sculptures came into being - almost airborne, in shades of blue, sage green, bronze and gold. Delicate and impalpable, they bring to mind everything we know of the gods of antiquity and restore the tendency of beauty to be both an element of redemption and a consolation of the flesh. Almost like butterflies emerging from cocoons huddled on the earth, human beings attempt to rise up towards the infinite.

“Time is number of movement in respect of the before and after.” (Aristotle, Physics, IV) Life is not to be found everywhere. It would not even be possible on our planet if the sun were just a little closer or a little further away, a little hotter or a little colder. In those conditions, not even one flower would grow on Earth. We cannot know if other forms of life exist in other parts of the universe, but what is certain is that if anything similar to the world as we know it exists, then it must exist in the vicinity of a star like the one that heats our planet. It took more than four billion years for man to evolve from the first primitive molecules and this time-scale is necessary for even the most elemental form of existence to come into being. The Italo-American Paola Giordano tries to imagine what an inhabited universe would be like. Her works abandon faithful representation of objective reality to make way for exploration fuelled by concepts that have their origin in the use of found objects, nails, springs, and drawing pins, all set against highly gestural painting. Her radical simplification of form is reinforced by the violent impact of the colours she chooses. Black, white, and red are the three cardinal colours of the palette on which she lays down her biological challenge. From the soil of a paint-impregnated canvas grow industrial roses, sometimes given a more feminine feel by the addition of fabrics. If ever the space around us were to give birth to something living, it would surely be female, capable of bestowing gentleness on the rocky magma that surrounds us.

“There is an invisible force (...) which holds the whole universe together.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Utet, I, 6, 47) We owe the birth of modern astronomy to a change in thinking. Newton discovered and affirmed Universal Gravitation through a synthesis of celestial and earthly mechanics. After Galileo’s findings, by which the phenomena of the cosmos could be explained thanks to the observations of an inhabitant of the Earth in motion, the English philosopher from Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire understood that the force that makes objects fall from a height on our planet was the same that kept objects in orbit in space.

Marialuisa Tadei’s work for the exhibition is dedicated to Newton’s revolution. Twelve rings of cast aluminium painted green, yellow, blue, and red and suspended from steel wires, create shadows suggestive of the trajectory of planets around their sun. Tadei, a sculptor and performance artist from Rimini, usually focuses on installations that deal with the themes of faith and human frailty. Here, she has created an impressive work that also addresses the Kantian idea of an infinite progression of worlds produced by the primeval nebula, which then generated our own solar system with its planets and their satellites. As the light changes throughout the day, Satellite Trajectories asks the skies if ultimately all the comings and goings of those objects, wonderfully arranged in the void, know anything about us and our restless hearts, or what our place in the workings of the heavens is.

“... where light is no longer of a single sort, consequently there are multiple effects; an impression is created.” (Emile Zola, Manifesto of Impressionism, exhibition in Nadar’s studio, Paris 1874) Any living being that possesses eyes is able to see the world thanks to the existence of light. Newton defined light as being matter made of corpuscles, or particles, of different colours but it was subsequently discovered that certain shimmering colours could only be explained by wave theory. Hence the dual nature of light: is it made up of particles or of waves? It depends on the type of phenomenon being observed. The answer to the mystery lies in the photon of quantum mechanics. A ray of light, depending on its intensity, is made up of extraordinary numbers of vibrating electromagnetic waves and the colours we see depend on the speed of the vibrations. The Impressionist painters were the first to make use of the substance of light in their work. What the eye perceives is a visual impression of a mix of colours, but the result varies with the changing times of the day or the seasons.

Katja Bernhard, a classically trained Austrian artist, experiments with the Impressionist philosophy in a contemporary key. The infinite possibilities afforded by the use of colours (including the complementary colours) allow the surface of her paintings to become independent of reality and be connected only to the emotions of the observer. Bernhard’s work, informal in style and in use of light, is the product of deeply personal experiences, of months spent in isolation in places of strong bright sunlight where she observed and virtually breathed the subjects she would transfer to her canvas. The result is a mystical quality of paint from which stories and passions emerge.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, I watched the c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gates. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” (Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer/Roy Batty)

Cyberspace is the domain that uses electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify and distribute information by means of computer networks and their physical infrastructure. It is considered to be a virtual dimension that allows all the computers in the world to communicate with each other. This creates a highly imaginative relationship between its users all over the planet. The term cyberspace was coined at the beginning of the 1980s in William Gibson’s cyberpunk science fiction, where he envisaged types of virtual reality that could be shared by users deeply immersed in spaces of the mind.

Marco Bolognesi describes an inhabited future. His photo-shoot sets depict a society precariously poised between race wars and a multimedia culture, where dreams and city-car star ships are parked in shopping malls on artificial satellites. The beautiful faces of models who inhabit this universe wear amulets, jewellery, accessories and make-up that bear witness to the eras, events, situations and paradoxes of human history. The dark and futuristic feel of the works of this photographer and filmmaker from Bologna set the standard for art that looks to the cosmos. It blends the harmony and fear, beauty and imagination, courage and arrogance of our species. Bolognesi’s humandroids are witnesses to something that is yet to happen but they can remember events that are written in the dusts of time. The energy they give off has the power to connect the before and the after of a quantum world, where each particle preserves traces of the past, while what we know of ourselves slips ever further away.

The further the sky moves away from us, the more the universe opens up before our eyes. But will we be able to safeguard tenderness?

We stand before the sky

Anna Caterina Bellati

Venice, Isola d’Oro, March 2015

Translated by Roma O’Flaherty

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. This image shows the pillars as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-coloured glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rustcoloured elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. With these new images comes better contrast and a clearer view for astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time.

The Hubble Space Telescope, at the Frontier of Science

The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken. Named in honour of the famous astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889.1953) - responsible for the discovery of the expansion of the Universe - the space telescope was the result of close international collaboration between NASA and ESA. Placed in orbit in 1990 by the Space Shuttle Discovery, Hubble is a telescope with a mirror 2,4 metres in diameter. Hubble’s position above the atmosphere allows it to be observe the Universe at wavelengths not accessible from the surface of our planet, such as the ultraviolet. Its location also places it above the atmospheric turbulence that causes stars to blur and twinkle when observed from the ground, enabling it to obtain strikingly clear images.

Designed in the seventies, Hubble had very ambitious goals. As the first in a series of Great Observatories in space, Hubble was built to address the most important questions about the nature of the Universe. As well as achieving its original major goals, including addiritmeasuring the expansion rate of the Universe, Hubble has gone on to make major contributions to almost all topics in astrophysics, from the nature of galaxies at very early epochs to the study of the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System. Hubble was designed to be maintained, modernised and repaired in orbit. To this end, the spacecraft was constructed to enable astronauts to access and change instruments and systems. It was the first space mission especially designed and built to be maintained in situ, 575 km from Earth, for at least ten years. Handles placed along the telescope allow astronauts to grasp the telescope easily. The various instruments are modular, removable and can be located with high precision in the optical system. A system of doors gives astronauts easy access to the interior of the telescope and the instruments it houses. In all, five shuttle servicing missions have been planned and executed. Each time, the astronauts have removed obsolete or failed instruments, replaced computers and gyroscopes, and installed new state-of-the-art instruments, leaving the telescope more powerful and technologically advanced. Measured in terms of sensitivity to faint objects and overall throughput, Hubble is about a hundred times more powerful now than when it was first launched.

Discoveries made with the Hubble Space Telescope over the last twenty years have profoundly changed our view of the Universe. Not only is the Universe expanding, its expansion is accelerating. A repulsive force termed dark energy, whose nature is unknown, is responsible for this accelerated motion. Hubble has also made images of planets orbiting nearby stars and shown that exoplanets have atmospheres whose composition can be measured, identifying constituents such as water and methane. Hubble has pushed our horizon back to the remote Universe, observing galaxies that were born only 600 million years after the Big Bang. It has continued to produce stunning images that have become familiar icons of modern life, showing us, through a wealth of detail, that the Universe is exquisitely beautiful, but also extremely complex. Hubble has not only changed our understanding of the Universe, it has changed the way we do science. It has brought the Universe into our homes, has inspired and continues to inspire many of us to the extent that it has become “the people’s telescope”. A science whose results were only available to a few has become a resource available to anybody with the interest to look.

Credit: NASA, ESA / Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team

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Image: Nome / Name: Eagle Nebula, M 16, Messier 16 Tipo / Type: Via Lattea / Milky Way Nebulosa / Nebula formazione di stelle / Star Formation Distanza / Distance: 7000 anni luce / light years Costellazione / Constellation: Serpens Cauda Credit: NASA, ESA / Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team

This image shows the pillars as seen in infrared light, allowing it to pierce through obscuring dust and gas and unveil a more unfamiliar - but just as amazing - view of the pillars. In this ethereal view the entire frame is peppered with bright stars and baby stars are revealed being formed within the pillars themselves. The ghostly outlines of the pillars seem much more delicate, and are silhouetted against an eerie blue haze.