ENTROPIA: IL DISSOLVIMENTO DELL’OPERA

Depending on the status given to it, a work of art is usually considered an artistic or ‘ingenious’ product, meant to last for eternity. When the creative process in the artist’s atelier is complete and the work is exhibited, it immediately assumes a passive, irrevocable role, which, institutionally speaking, is its final value. The work of art is kept in an immutable state, where there is no place for the natural ‘ageing’ process. Hence it becomes a passive matter, which can acquire a new meaning on an intellectual level only, through its contextualisation and interpretation.

The exhibition “Entropy: on the vanishing work” collects the creations of eleven international artists who do not view the work of art as an inalterable, measurable and physical object, created for eternity, but as uncertain and mutable, processable and variable, even chaotic. In this context, the term entropy, which is used to indicate the instability and contingency inside the system, assumes a conceptual definition.

The works exhibited – live performances, site specific installations, objects, documents, 16mm films and videos reproduced on DVD – express this idea of perpetual mutability and fleetingness, existing only as a product of their annihilation.

Therefore, the essence of these works lies in the exhibition of their future dissolution. This ‘destructive’ orientation results, paradoxically, in a moment of extreme vitality: what disappears is what continues to exist (forever). The evolutionary character, that is the transition from one condition to another is nothing more than the representation of the fragility of human essence.