The key to paradise, 2007.
Nanoart installation

Our infinitesimal aesthetic universe is the result of the collision of art with the infinitely small world of nanotechnology. Establish a contact with that parallele, invisible and for most of us unknown world means, for art, to discover surprising and powerful technologies and revolutionary ways of expression that promote the development of new asthetic approaches, alternative points of view, different interpretations of the world. The collision – or to better say the meeting – of art with nanotechnology brings to the creation of artworks most of the times unaccessible to human eyes, that represents a concrete aesthetic paradox: an invisible visual art. Nanoart, in other words, to the giantism and the grandeur of contemporary art oppose its resizing. The surplus of images is substituted by their subtraction, and the dictatorship of the eye, under unperceivable and invisible attacks, seems to be in question, seems to vacillate.

The artwork selected for the exhibition – titled The key to paradise - is part of that invisible universe, and it’s not just a challenge to the usual perception of artworks; it’s not just a macroscopic symbol of the resizing of contemporary art, but it’s also an expression of a challenge the laws of God, as the Bible, Jesus says: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24. Similar verses are in Mark 10:25 and Luke 18:25). In other words, the artwork ironically offers to a single, very rich man the key to open the doors of paradise, unaccessible to him until now. And if The key to paradise would also prefigure the not-so-hidden project of humankind to create a new universe, where man replace God and becomes the creator of an eternal file? Is that one of the possible, futuristic scenery of human life? And is that a destiny to be wished? Thanks to Physics Doctors Giancarlo Canavese, Alessandro Chiolerio, Gabriele Maccioni, Giacomo Piacenza, Samy Strola and Prof. Fabrizio Pirri for the realization of nano and micro artworks in the laboratories of Chilab-Latemar of Polytechnic of Turin, and the curator.

Alessandro Scali & Robin Goode:

Alessandro Scali, from Turin, Italy, 35 years old, and Robin Trevor Goode, from Cape town, South Africa, 29 years old, begin their artistic collaboration in 2003. Two different cultural backgrounds, two different ways of expression merge together: from one side, the humanistic, litereary, philosophycal approach of Scali; from the other, the visual, graphic and iconographic approach of Goode. The interest for the merging of those two alternative but complementary visions is the main reason of their union. Scali and Goode shows their first artwork in 2004, in Madrid, at Conde Duque, under the name of Paperkut; in the same year, they begin the experimentation of Nanoart with the collaboration of Politechnic of Turin. In 2006, the first micrometric artwork – Beyond the pillar of Hercules – is presented at San Fedele Award, in Milan. In 2007, the exibition at Bergamo Science, the publication of the related Skira catalogue and the article published on Nature ratify the official entry of Nanoart, and of Scali and Goode, in the world of contemporary art.