PAS DE DEUX
Amalia Del Ponte knows a crystal cannot be alone.
Two copper wires, a plaster hand (deaf like a word) signify the electricity of quartz subjected to pressure; a pedestal, a point of aim and an aimed object signify the optical properties of a prism. The mineral darkness that used to protect them still covers the speech of the crystals, placed on a microscopic scale: the crystals surround themselves with tools. Then, Del Ponte intervenes drastically, powerfully, on the mystery of Temperance, correcting its quotations and its symbolic references, as if compensating for the silence of crystals, objects of a too sublimate nature, resistant to language.
However, the mystery surrenders to their fundamental property: being silent about their dynamism and liveliness. The mercurial fluid is invisible among the pitchers: they point to two directions in space, close enough to be both perceived and touched, but devoid of a mark proving their mutual dependence. Exactly like the two properties of crystals: optical and electric.
And I will stop there, as I detect the risk of a vicious cycle.
Anne Marie Sauzeau Boetti
From one goblet to the other, Temperance pours a fluid. From one goblet to the other, Amalia tunes, “tempers” the virtues of light and crystals. In several Tarot cards, Amalia turns into Iris: behind her golden wings sun shines, while under her feet yellow irises bloom.
Thus the vital spirit pours the vital nourishment from one vase to the other: such act of pouring is not a moderating virtue meant to “water down”, but rather a vital enterprise of exchange and polarization between two modes of matter: optical/electric and color/heat. Here, two functions of the crystalline structure of quartz are joined chemically. The old pre-scientific rêverie and the material imagination of Temperance produce a fantasizing, lazy, punctual form of physics, already endowed with the modern scientific discoveries about several aspects of the structure of matter (or waves, or particles). But everything is placed among ancient pitchers: all that is fluid recalls water, and among the pitchers, liquids burn. The marriage between imaginary water and light generates alcoholic spirit, “punch”, as Bachelard would put it. Burned water creates the energetic arc, the quartz arc, the rainbow, the electric range, the tuning fork.
Anne Marie Sauzeau Boetti
Do you see an eight in this exhibition? There are two works, quartz and oil painting, fixed and volatile, each with its own circle: they both function even when they touch in one point, a point I would love to study! Such point is the prism, its active transparence that sets the exchange between model/copy and electricity/optics in motion. Or is quartz an O, turned into an eye?
Gian Battista Salerno