SOLILOQUY Painting

“Quid prodest strepitus oris muto corde?” Wrote Augustine in his Confessions. What is the use of shouting if the heart is silent? Our contemporary world returns to us a very different image. It is the heart that shouts, our ego, our inner self, it is the deepest part of ourselves that suffocates, driven by the compulsive need to appear and to show ourselves to the world, and which, as Mario Perniola would say, retires into its shadow, exactly as art does when we try and summarise its essence. Something tries to speak to us, to avoid the digital barriers to reach us in immediacy, but we no longer know how to listen. And so then the red thread, cut, falls inert, like a hand tired of holding itself out towards the other while waiting to be grasped.