If I close my eyes, the absence of light activates the peripheral cells devoted to
the perception of darkness. The awareness of “seeing oneself seeing”
is in its essence a thought, one that is internal to the vision and previous to any
object of sight. To this amphibious faculty, the “diaphanous color of
darkness,” Aristotle assigns the principle of knowledge. “Vision is a
whole perceptual system, not a channel of sense.” Functions of vision are
interwoven with the texture of human interaction within a terrestrial environment
that is in turn contained into the cosmic order. A transitive host within the
resonance of an inner-outer environment, the human being is the contact-term between
two orders of scale, both bigger and smaller than the individual unity. In the
perceptual integrative system of human vision, the convergence-divergence of the
corporeal presence and the diffraction of its own appearance is the margin. The
sensation of being no longer coincides with the breath of life, it does not seems
“real” without the trace of some visible evidence and its
simultaneous “sharing”. Without a shadow, without an imprint, the
numeric copia of the physical presence inhabits the transient memory of our
electronic prostheses. A rudimentary “visuality” replaces tangible
experience dissipating its meaning and the awareness of being alive. Transversal to
the civilizations of the ancient world, through different orders of function and
status, the anthropomorphic “figuration” of archaic sculpture
addressees the margin between Being and Non-Being. Statuary human archetypes are not
meant to be visible, but to exist as vehicles of
transcendence to outlive the definition of human space-time. The awareness of
individual finiteness seals the compulsion to “give body” to an
invisible apparition shaping the figuration of an ontogenetic expression of human
consciousness. Subject and object, the term “humanum” fathoms the
relationship between matter and its living dimension, “this de facto vision
and the ‘there is’ which it contains.” The project
reconsiders the dialectic between the terms vision–presence in the
contemporary perception of archaic human statuary according to the transcendent
meaning of its immaterial legacy.