Bruno Jakob: Nothing is lost. Art and Matter in TransformationGAMeC, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy
The show is the second chapter in the Trilogy of Matter, a long-term exhibition project begun in October 2018 with the exhibition Black Hole. Art and Materiality from Informal to Invisible.
The project involves art historians, curators, philosophers, and scientists, and addresses a transversal debate around the theme of matter, while at the same time activating a dialogue with the history of scientific discoveries and drawing a comparison with the development of aesthetic theories. The program foresees a cycle of three exhibitions, accompanied by as many publications, featuring the presence of artists and works of various generations.
After the first appointment in the cycle—dedicated to the essence of matter, to all its depth, in dialogue with the theories of modern physics—the second exhibition in the program turns its attention to the work of those artists who, at various times, have investigated the transformation of matter, drawing inspiration from the lives of the elements to develop a reflection on the reality of things, on change, and on time.
“Rien ne se perd” (“nothing is lost”) is the opening to the famous maxim attributed to Lavoisier, with which the French chemist explained the general sense of his law of the conservation of mass, which stated that over the course of a chemical reaction, the sum of the mass of the reactants is equal to the sum of the masses of the substances. Matter, in other words, cannot be created and cannot be destroyed.
This fundamental principle would set the stage for a number of founding notions of modernity, which over the centuries to come, would lead to the definition of the theory of relativity and thus to the identification of a substantial equivalence between mass and energy, and hence to the progressively more elaborate belief—as recounted by scientists, artists, and philosophers—in matter which is always alive, always present, part of a world in endless transformation.
