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Francesco Corsi / 2022

MAbits Art

Daily life appears to be more and more permeated by technology. Indeed, the digital world seems to question the irreducibility of nature, subjecting it to a dangerous game of manipulation. Many, many are enthusiastically experiencing this virtualization process. Flati defines them as "Cyber optimists" who are opposed to "bio purists" who look at the complex phenomenon of technology with naive terror.

The century of the avant-garde has given us a panorama of rupture in which art rebels against the bourgeois spirit, against moralizing contents, distancing itself from the classical vision, moving away from the search for harmony, pursuing pure expression, gesture, up to completely break with reality, to which abstractionism arrives. Artists increasingly seek provocation, interpreting a nihilism that does not wish to seek any vision of the world. Futurists are enthusiastic about technology and exalt its visions. The machine seems to have become the main reference of a man who projects himself beyond himself.

Giancarlo Flati, heir of the avant-gardes, assumes the will to overcome the classical schemes, however placing himself beyond the same spirit of the avant-gardes.

If with Lucio Fontana, art becomes philosophy, exploration of the concept, detaching itself from figuration, with Flati art becomes an exploration of the concept itself, however, through the powerful symbolic language of figuration, albeit at the borders of the abstract.

The artist has in fact founded a manifesto: "The MAbits tree", using the most classic symbolic image in history: the tree of life that with a clover structure, generates its fruits which are Qbits, Bits, Ebits. 

The aerial roots of this tree are rooted in the imaginary margins that exist between Art-Science, Mind-Matter, Mind-Spirit, to draw the lifeblood aimed at generating a New Renaissance. Art, like philosophy in the contemporary world, seems to take on the role, not so much about building visions of the world, but of fostering a physical meeting place between worlds that seem to be opposed.

The technological world, digital as opposed to the natural world, could find a third way, thanks to that gray area that articulates with the aesthetic perception of the "margin": a sort of median dimension, which seems to coincide with the role of the man, to act as an intermediary between the material world of nature and the spiritual world of metaphysics.

After all, this is how Flati sees the "IN-FOR-MAZIONE" of the digital world. The prefix "IN" would refer to that spontaneous intuition, which seems to draw from the cosmic Mind, to an invisible, internal, "implicated" order that pre-exists the adventure of experience; and this is the Qbits. In this regard, I want to mention the Jesuit who first computerized the Bible when computers still worked with punch cards: Father Roberto Busa, who in the book "From the computer to the angels", explained precisely that this world that allows you to intuit something like the Bit, has an angelic root.

So the idea that is part of the "IN", is logically structured in the "FORM", or the Bits, and then moves on to the "ACTION", the Ebits, which gives dynamic development to the energy that connects the viewer with the artist for the mediation of the work. This is why Flati speaks of “connected” works, using a contemporary familiar language. Creating "connected" works means giving voice to that intimate hidden, esoteric world of intuitions and making them reach the emotional and rational sphere of the viewer. If the artist fails in this connection, according to Flati, he should destroy his own works.

Communication therefore, in perfect line with the vision of Pop art, has a fundamental role, but in a diametrically opposite dimension: Pop art steals the image of advertising and transforms it into a work of art, as well as in "Ready made" conception.

The art of MAbits, on the other hand, is very far from the "applied" art that operates translations and reversals, to which, after Duchamp, artists like Cattelan have accustomed us: Flati work brings into being an aesthetic of "implication", where the artist's action searches for a common root between the micro and the macrocosm.

Giancarlo Flati, professor in Microsurgery, has experienced the concrete dimension of microtechnologies and the infinitely small that is the foundation of nature and exists in perfect harmonious relationship with the infinitely large.

The whole world is interconnected and every phenomenon due to the mystery of "entanglement", introduced by Schroedinger, can connect with another phenomenon regardless of the place.

This reveals a non-local character of physical reality, making it acceptable to the idea that the work of art is born beyond time, because it arises from an intuitive metaphysical dimension. If we accept this, the work of art ceases to have to follow the lines of its own time, because indeed, it is itself that digs into the depths of the human soul and grasps new perspectives, new visions, to transfer an ever-renewed energetic wave that comes from the abysses of Being.

Art "stolen" from the world of advertising, art subtracted from the world of common objects, is communication, provocation, and irony, but it seems to have severed those aerial roots that Flati instead wants to highlight with his artistic work.

In a materialistic and basically atheistic climate, I like to remember that St. Thomas identified the fundamental category of Being in the category of "relationship". Each seems to be interconnected with the Being that governs the world, the whole, without which we would be swallowed up by nothing.

And Flati, in critical dialogue with that conceptual art that ends up generating no concept, wants to give life to a Think Tank. The artist defined himself as "a castaway of an anomalous wave of history", because art must go back to being propulsion, energy, which pushes far beyond what has already been seen. Of course, those who go too far and shipwreck find themselves on a desert island, but it is from the desert, compared to what has already been seen, that new insights arise.

This is how the critic Luciano Carini describes Flati's poetics: "Painting made of quantum fluctuations, paths, paths and filaments that capture the observer projecting him inside his visual plot and inside the illusory dimension of the space of representation in a scan endless geometric.

A sign, that of Flati, which does not appear soft and fluid, but rather tormented and fragmented in continuous stratifications, in alternating and intermittent rhythms and then, again, the intervention of various and diversified materials such as roots, woods, debris, fossils and electronic boards: a poetic reference to the past and a precious reflection on the present, on a changed reality in continuous, incessant becoming.

An expression that at times is dressed in luminous and almost transparent lightness, at other times with dark and dramatic depth, at other times with clear and magical cosmic distances that recall infinite and unknown stellar worlds. Its colors are also beautiful which, with spontaneity and immediacy, pass from the liquid to the material state to convey the meaning of life, the shattering of existence, the unexpected events of mortal destiny.

An intense expression, this of Giancarlo Flati, where the greatness of the primal emptiness always appears, but also, and above all, the amazement and wonder in front of the beauty of the universe.

And his concrete proposal is not so much that of creating a "New Painting Current" o the establishment of a more or less gregarious spirit, but rather that of constituting, over time, a real free and open Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Laboratory, breaking down the boundaries or margins between space and matter, science and art, mind and conscience, visible and invisible and reaching the Edge of the Edges, the extreme border of the subtle matter, where everything is light and suspended, soul and spirit, where the true and undisputed territory of art begins".