The archetype of nothing by Richard Silvaggio

THE ARCHETYPE OF NOTHING.

I felt the need, in the course of time, to identify an essential code: the desire, maybe the urge, to push my work towards a formula of synthesis capable of expressing the drawings of my thoughts in a clean and instant attractiveness. I sacrificed the use of color. I wanted to reduce the variables, to go along the inside conflict of my conscious state on a graphic level. In other words, the operation might unveil ingenuous reflexes, but the tension that pushes the thought to the extreme limit of contradiction is precisely human. We are not able to imagine death: it does not produce images. We are also unable to crystalize the source of our thinking process, the self, therefore the fundament of life. I grasp my being as a transaction between two essential conditions that, however, I cannot see. And it’s between these two extremities, in a recursive ring, that my thinking substance consumes. I am, we are, the grey tone that elapses between black and white. The same grey that gives volume to the draperies I paint, draperies that in turn give volume to an empty figure that reveals in truth the absence during the act of searching and self-questioning. The challenge, in my opinion, is to reach to an esthetic, to an intrinsic beauty of image, that yes, conveys a content, but a content that, as a last extreme paradox, expresses the inexpressible: nothing