The ungraspable nature of reality relates to a simple but staggering idea: what we call ‘reality’ never lets itself be totally grasped. As soon as we think we understand it, it shifts, transforms, evades us. Reality is not a stable set of forms and certainties, but a living, fragmentary, at times inconsistent experience, of which we only ever perceive a fraction.
Reality escapes our senses as much as our understanding. Our gaze selects, our memory recomposes, our imagination completes. What we perceive of the world is inseparable from our own experience, our body, our moves and the passage of time. Reality is never given as a whole, it is always partially reconstructed.
To grasp reality is at the heart of the quest of art practice. Since the avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century, artists no longer content themselves with reproducing the appearance of the world. They try to reveal its invisible structures, to convey movement, to give shape to what eludes the gaze. Abstraction doesn’t necessarily represent a break from reality, but on the opposite, can be perceived as an attempt to come close to its essence.