Translations by ChatGPTPlus and Grammarly
Translations by ChatGPTPlus and Grammarly
In Robert Henri’s thought, the artistic gesture is never neutral: every mark retains something of the inner state from which it arises.
The brushstroke is not merely matter deposited on a surface, but the living trace of a presence, a quality of attention, a way of being.
This intuition meets the concept of objective art formulated by G. I. Gurdjieff: an art in which nothing should be casual or accidental, neither in the creative process nor in the impression produced on the viewer.
The work does not arise as a simple subjective expression, but as the conscious construction of a resonance.
In this perspective, Living Fulcrum is not merely a painting or a luminous installation. It is an artwork-experiment: a perceptual field created to question whether an inner state, maintained by the artist throughout the creative process, can be perceived by the public.
To realise the work, 33 hours of focused painting were required, distributed over four days and preceded by two years of training in concentration and presence. The work did not consist only in painting, but in “staying with it”: maintaining intention, attention and emotional quality without dispersing them.
The question posed by the experiment is radical:
can an artwork transmit something of the state of consciousness in which it was created?
Contemporary art has recognised the viewer’s central role in the interpretation of the artwork. This perceptual freedom is an important achievement, but it also opens a decisive question: where does listening to the artwork end, and where does the viewer’s subjective projection begin?
Living Fulcrum arises within this threshold. It does not intend to deny interpretative freedom, but to suspend it temporarily in order to verify whether another kind of encounter is possible: one not founded on taste, judgement or personal association, but on a clearer, more receptive and conscious perception.
The issue is not simply seeing. It concerns the interruption of interpretative automatism: preconception, conditioned reflex, the immediate response of the “I” before the image.
In this sense, the experiment does not ask the viewer to “understand” the work, but to observe themselves while encountering it. Perception thus becomes a practice: a seed in becoming, capable of transforming the relationship between artist, artwork and public.
Seven public sessions took place from 14 to 16 February 2020 at the Centro Culturale Museo Elisarion in Minusio, Switzerland.
The performance-experiment Sensibile è la chiara luce. Tra le parvenze fallaci… Come una folgore arose from the encounter with the thought of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and, in particular, with the concept of objective art as reported by P. D. Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous.
This reference is not used as an ornamental theoretical frame, but as an operational starting point. Through Gurdjieff, the artist encounters the hypothesis of an art capable of reducing accident and acting upon the observer through an intentional, conscious and not merely subjective transmission.
To attempt this possibility means confronting an extremely demanding practice: not losing the thread of the concept, not dispersing the intention, and not allowing automatisms, emotional fluctuations or distractions to interrupt the creative process. It means remaining present with the body, the heart, the mind and the SPIRIT.
The following passage constitutes the theoretical core from which the experiment begins:
Gurdjieff — […] All that you know, all that you call art, is subjective art, which I refuse to call art, because I give this name only to objective art. The difference between objective art and subjective art lies in the fact that, in objective art, the artist really creates: he does what he intends to do, he introduces into his work the ideas and feelings he wishes to transmit. And the action of his work upon people is absolutely definite; they will receive, each according to their own level, the same ideas and the same feelings that the artist intended to convey.
When it is a question of objective art, there can be nothing accidental, either in the creation of the work itself or in the impressions it produces. When, on the other hand, it is a question of subjective art, everything is accidental. The artist, I repeat, does not create; something creates itself through him. This means that such an artist is at the mercy of ideas, thoughts and moods that he himself does not understand and over which he has no control.
A pupil of Gurdjieff — Does art not risk disappearing by becoming so precise? one of us asked. Is there not perhaps a certain imprecision, something indeterminate, that distinguishes art from what is called science? If this impression disappeared, and if the artist himself ceased to ignore what he wanted to obtain and knew in advance the impression his work would produce on the public, then it would be a book… no longer art.
Gurdjieff — I do not know what you are talking about. We use different measures: I value art by its consciousness; you appreciate it the more it is unconscious.
We cannot understand one another.
A work of objective art must be a book, as you call it. The only difference is that the artist does not transmit his ideas directly through words, signs or hieroglyphs, but through definite feelings that he evokes consciously and systematically, knowing what he is doing and why he is doing it.
In this context, the reference to Gurdjieff does not close the research within a definition, but opens it to verification. Living Fulcrum becomes the place where a theoretical possibility is put to the test through the artist’s body, the duration of the gesture and the perception of the public.
The experiment unfolded through a sequence designed to suspend immediate interpretation and predispose the public to a more receptive perception. After an introduction to misperception through a video and site-specific works dedicated to optical illusions, the participants listened to Gurdjieff’s passage on objective art.
In the main hall of the Museo Elisarion, after a first brief viewing of Living Fulcrum illuminated, the public was guided by Mya Lurgo through the Breathing Practice for Hyperlucid Vision: a circular and rhythmic technique, born from meditative writing, performed with one hand on the abdomen and the other on the heart, alternating open and closed eyes in order to internalise the image of the work.
At the end of the seven breathing cycles, Mya Lurgo asked the question three times:
“How do you feel in the heart of life, in the eternal pulse of becoming, within Living Fulcrum — the living fulcrum — where everything takes form? What do you feel?”
Only then did the participants fill in the anonymous questionnaire, indicating the emotion they had perceived. While the forms were being collected, Mya Lurgo declared the emotion she had most strongly experienced during the thirty-three hours of focused painting: calm. The anonymous responses were then read aloud, revealing in real time the perceptual convergence that had emerged from the group.
The protocol did not aim to measure the public’s taste, but to verify whether, under conditions of prepared attention, a shared resonance could manifest around the emotional state inscribed in the work.
From the 77 tests collected at the end of the seven performances, calm emerged as the prevailing emotion. The result coincides with the emotional state that Mya Lurgo had declared she had most strongly experienced during the thirty-three hours of focused painting: after an initial phase of vertigo, wonder, and vital exaltation, the creative process returned to a profound sense of inner peace and relief.
The experiment does not claim to demonstrate objective art in absolute terms, but opens a concrete field of verification: under specific conditions of attention, perceptual preparation and guided presence, the artwork can become a vehicle for a shared resonance between artist and public.
The main limit remains language. Each participant had to translate an inner experience into a word, choosing among primary and secondary emotions. Yet feeling can exceed the available vocabulary: as Wittgenstein suggests, the limits of language coincide with the limits of the world.
In this perspective, Living Fulcrum does not close the question of objective art, but relaunches it as a practice and as a decisive stage towards the ART OF THE SPIRIT: an art that does not represent the spiritual, but attempts to operate from a state of alignment between body, heart, mind and SPIRIT.
The original Italian catalogue of the performance-experiment Sensibile è la chiara luce. Tra le parvenze fallaci… Come una folgore brings together the theoretical context, photographic documentation, the hyperlucid vision protocol, public observations, test results and behind-the-scenes reports.
View the original Italian catalogue.
