EL SENTIDO DE UN COMIENZO

"Listen to music with your ears, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Ask yourself only if the effort has allowed you to wander into a previously unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want? Vassily Kandinsky. When in the first book of his Metaphysics, Aristotle characterized the essence of philosophy as the science of principles - for example, the first principles - constructing a virtual journey from its beginnings, he established for Western thought a model of meaning attribution. The juridical, testimonial, almost police-like investigation into the origin of questions would thus be the architectural foundation (in its etymological sense of first, principal, archaic, and founding construction) of all signs, like a utopian place where meaning and signifier would merge into the unity of a primordial paradise. The playful evocation of that phantom sign, ubiquitous and absent, runs through Jorge Miño's entire body of work and particularly through the works in this exhibition. In the evolution of his work, he deconstructs and reconstructs his perception of the world, driven by intense aesthetic, ethical, and social concerns related to the objective sign of urban architecture, whether peripheral or central, both in its material aspect and in the human aspect. Synthesis of his search is the material icon of a foundational culture and, depending on the case, of social innovation or decline. The architecture of life as a daily object is therefore the key to the twists and turns of his work, characterized by austere and neutral geometries as vital bases of interrelationships and involvements with his inner vision of society, veiled by an image at times rarified by color or the presence of matter as hyperstructural perception. He has gradually developed a series of codes that establish lines of mathematical relationships that extend in each work towards the context of pure unreality until they reach the circumstances that will be preserved in the character or situations of the next work. This demonstrates to what extent his works are all connected by a common thread. The everyday is for us something natural, a concept seemingly without beginning or end to which it is almost impossible to adhere, as any attempt to evoke a possible definition makes it stop at the very beginning of the phenomenon. It is undeniable that an important aspect of it is the universe of converging architectural objects, to the point of constituting a universe within another universe. But if we think about those signs that distinguish our contemporary life, the immediate association with the realm of objects beyond the everyday leads us to think that the supremacy of some objects leads us to surpass the exceptional nature of others, in a way that invites us to search within ourselves for the narrative capable of bringing us into a state of permanent knowledge. Of definitions and redefinitions. In his compulsion for definitions, Aristotle postulates that belonging to the city determines the essence of man as a thinking and philosophizing being giving meaning. Man: an animal, but of the polis. And the interplay of absent cities progressively founds the identity of the West: the distant and destroyed Troy of The Iliad, the longed-for Ithaca of Odysseus, the Nubecucolandia of Aristophanes' The Birds, modélicamente suspended like the geometric figures of the series TRIUMPH OF THE UNREAL of the artist, as the ethereal counterpart of Plato's invisible ideal Republic, luminously subterranean, as in the series LINES OF CONTAINMENT, and synthesized in Augustine of Hippo's City of God, that foundation, in dramatic chiaroscuro, of the bases of the European worldview. Just as color and light are the main (first) elements of vision, their initial stimulus, and through the brain's ability to process them, the perceiver distinguishes form and space where they are found, in the series THE SENSE OF A BEGINNING, the visual experience intensifies the representation of forms and space in a synthesis of pure light. While in the series VOLUMES OF EMPTINESS (GOLDEN), the evoked protagonist is emptiness as an infinite or immeasurable capacity to be and understand everything. The infinite as the matrix of that fantasy and creativity that can be glimpsed in the reflections and glimmers generated by the artwork. Always playing with the sacramentally artificial and symbolic nature of the sign, the series PERSPECTIVE OF THE SIMULACRUM reverses the terms of the relationship between visual simulation and reality reproduced by the photographic medium, as in the theses on the unreality of the visual by Jean Baudrillard. In other words, the relationship between images that refer to each other with their simulative similarities. And along the same refractory path, the images in the series TRANSLUCENT SKIN remind us of Marguerite Yourcenar's words: "But, unlike what happens in dream activity, here the vertigo provoked by labyrinthine forms, by deceptive perspectives, by the overwhelming and multiplying of figures, is dominated by the precise and vigilant control of the thoughts of the craftsman who constructs a geometric world whose measurements result from a 'multiplicity of calculations that are known to be exact and that lead to proportions that are known to be incorrect'" (The Dark Brain of Piranesi). In this way, Jorge Miño reflects on the not always passive acceptance of change and the gradual deformation of his vital environment, especially that of the city, but also, in general, that of humanity. Without particular references, but with a universal vision that is typical of his will and curiosity as such, he shows us a world where the object and the vision merge, dominate, and contaminate each other to the maximum extent and tension. Using photography, the artist harnesses the means offered by his training, reality, vision, fantasy, and undoubtedly solid technical skill for construction, with which he highlights the panoramic vision of his research. He shows situations that seemingly arise only from a dream world but actually seem to remind us that everything has happened and what is seen is the order of things. Thus, the supposed calmness of surreal situations in a minimal space hides and at the same time suggests the violence of others. He helps us understand that the quality of urban space causes contamination that goes far beyond the material itself. It transcends the physical and intellectual surface of the people who inhabit it, even though it is the individuals themselves who, by their own will or distraction, have constructed the environment according to their own use and consumption, to the point of subjecting matter to the reality of disintegration. MASSIMO SCARINGELLA