Heart

The heart is the centre of our being. The West has made it into the origin of our feelings, of passion, quite the opposite of traditional cultures which placed there intelligence and intuition, therein dwells the soul. In biblical tradition the heart represented the inner person, his or her emotional life, the origin of wisdom. In a passage of the Old Testament King Solomon pleads with God to bestow him with an “intelligent heart”, a “shrewd and wise heart”. Its movements (systoles and diastoles) make it also the symbol of the double movement of expansion and re- absorption of the universe. Over time, a tripartite form has been structured, a simple and complex code which belongs to the universal alphabet. At the base, a triangle with above it two circles. The heart is red and white, a flow of arterial and venous blood, it has the colours of life, and it brings together races, origins, religions and different cultures. With our heart open or closed, wearing our heart on our sleeve, we go in search of or we shut out relationships. There are the reasons of the heart, there is the fetish heart with its stereotyped iconography, an image worn thin by too much rhetoric, which only artists know how to transform, a “Warholian” Pop heart, merchandised, inflated, that of simplistic romantic literature, and of sentimentalism.

Artistic creation is however a vital necessity, art is the heart of life, a centre of propulsion which eliminates all borders and diversity. Art is the fire which transforms, creates and destroys and this process happens in the heart of the void, or rather in the spirit, because in the apparent void there is a pulsing energy, an eternal energy, one which never dies out. One can give a vision to absence by means of matter as did Yves Klein, and through the experience of the void feel the racing heart of life which is a spiritual experience. Artists create never-ending worlds in space and time and they draw energy from the immaterial, in which everything already exists and is continuously recreated. Symbols, enigmas and messages flow in and out of the heart, chaos becomes order and order is a part of chaos. As a symbol it offers a transcendental reality which is also that of the mystic, of the prophet, of the artist. In this day and age, the excess of display and image can provoke a short circuit, a “stroke”, a creative heart attack, which is perhaps why some artists camouflage themselves and art starts to choose invisibility, the virtual world, the new thresholds of living, with the obsession of understanding where the heart of life beats. Art is the eternal game of the imagination, a vehicle of sensitivity: “the artist – Plato wrote – creates dreams for those who are awake”. The immense force of cosmic energy has as its engine the heart of creation. The heart is the poetic place of inspiration, encounter, decision and truth. In the incessant movement of life, beats the planetary heart to which we all belong.

Stefania Carrozzini