Some cultures, more than others, have enhanced the connective potential of the interstice, revealing its dialectical nature: this is the case of the Japanese one, magnificently exemplified by Diptych by Hasegawa Tohaku (16th century), where “a void full of meaning” is recognized: the reference is to the concept of Ma, partially translatable as “space ”, but also as “distance”, “void”, “rhythm”, “opening”. The use of white space becomes, in the Japanese artistic disciplines that embrace its principle, a space full of potential or current links, explicit or only intuited in the visual impact with the empty interstice. The crucial elements in Tohaku’s works, within very simple, almost minimalist compositions acquire a new meaning in the light of the emptiness that surrounds them: such as an alignment of majestic pine trees sketched, with various shades, in ink only.

This game between veiling and unveiling, this equivocality of the visible and of the knowledge that is connected to it, in the contemporary context has been explored in different ways by the artists (demonstration, this, of how nagging and polymorphic the nature of the problem is): Gerhard Richter interprets it as blur, for example, while Emilio Isgrò makes it a practice of erasure.

Richter's portraits are characterized by an evanescence that unequivocally retraces the concepts scharf (in focus) and unscharf (blurred) born in the context of the photographic and cinematographic field, with the intention of creating an evident reference to the technical error that can occur in photography when the image is blurred, not sharp. In the artist's portraits, we are faced with the impossibility of fully bringing the depicted image into focus, since we have only a partial anticipation of it, which we must be satisfied. These attempts at representation appear to the eye as photographs without a focus, which perfectly render the illusion instilled in us by all things somehow wrapped in an aura of mystery which, however, we intimately know, we will never grasp. Emilio Isgrò, since the mid-1960s, has worked on the construction of a very personal visual language, based on the targeted use of various “erasures” which, according to the artist himself, are not operations of censorship, but aim to open up the potential of language through a dialectical interplay between full and empty, where the blackened parts are found to act as unprecedented connections between the words involved. What Isgrò aims at is a real regeneration of language, starting from the unveiling of its limits: erasing allows to establish an unprecedented relationship with words, eliminating any claim of a univocal meaning, established once and for all.

Sometimes we delude ourselves that we know the world just because we know how it is made, but that doesn't really mean “knowing”. That the world is and that we are in it, this is what awakens that wonder leading us to ask ourselves why it exists, why we are here, what moves us in search of answers that (perhaps) do not exist. But if there are no answers, then why ask the question? The fact is that they are inevitable, essential: it is constitutive of the human essence to investigate the mysteries, despite the awareness that perhaps you will never be able to reveal them. Because what man seeks, after all, is not so much truth, as research itself. This perpetual search is therefore configured as the existential condition of man, which is precisely that animal that hesitates, stopping on the threshold between the known and the unknown, between emptiness and fullness. In fact, the point of the enigma is not so much the answer, but the ability to endure the absence of an answer. How can you bear it? First of all, by inventing an answer. Faced with the veil of Maya, man can only imagine what the veil hides, while remaining perfectly aware of the impossibility of tearing it apart, and therefore of knowing with certainty what it hides.