that activates all our attention, placing the observer before a spectacle in which lightness dominates absolutely. This quality makes the sculpture fly towards the architecture, as is also the case with “Suspended Column”, miraculously constructed with the paradoxical use of flowing water. Instead, the vacuum seems to be the adhesive of the installation in the Finmeccanica courtyard. It is devoid of weight and sound. The single parts move slowly before our gaze, rising and falling in lateral movements that seem to highlight harmony as a cosmic law of every universal form. Silvana De Stefano’s mentality is definitely neo-Platonist, since she understands that the essence of every object is its lightness, the materialization of every normal weight and the transfer of every reality into the excellence of artistic forms. Therefore the artist enlivens the mute space and invests it with the worldliness transmitted by technology, creating a work that multiplies space by time and the object by the image. The result is an intertwining of installation, painting and design that restores the complexity of the experience, always made up of homogenous signs and never restrictive but always complex and ambiguous. The courtyard becomes the wing of a metaphysical space regulated by a presence vying with absence, a metaphor for the identity of art that constructs an autonomous reality through language with methods that are not consistent with those of reality. To the false fullness of things, art responds with the emptying of appearances. If things obstruct the space
inhabited by people, with their three-dimensional weight, artworks accept living in another three-dimensional space, a prelude to a possible journey beyond appearances. This is how the thickness passes from inertia to a metaphysical tension adorned and furnished with the heavy presence of objects that conceal areas of space, according to the universal laws of art, interpreted by the discretion of the artist who has decided to occupy that space. This work by De Stefano is a delicate one that does not sing of triumph. In fact, the motif is absent sound – only the television transmission of the image of the space without exciting or significant events. Nonetheless, the space is “without return”. It cannot return to its original condition. Touched by art, it has acquired a connotation of irreversible formal intensity. Here the irony of the artist gives meaning to the senseless, anonymous space of the world – a consciousness of the importance of art. An ethical awareness of creation that juxtaposes, without arrogance, emptiness with fullness, the idea with the pure evidence of the phenomenon. Art is a pure interrogation that seeks to intensify the sight and hearing of the world.