“All the works of art have a power on us, and more they are great more they have power.”

(Based on the film, The Stendhal Syndrome, 1996)

The civil living constantly imposes behavioral obligations on us, such as controlling ourselves, inhibiting impulses, managing emotions. But sometimes the Self that we build on obligations and censures needs to undress to enter into communion with something bigger: nature, the universe, humanity. Art and beauty are perhaps the greatest resources available to mankind to get in touch with something bigger.

If for the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy great art gets back into play the sense of the world, for the psychoanalysis artistic beauty can even undermine the identity of those who “enjoy” it. Indeed it is difficult to observe a masterpiece remaining detached, passive, cold, imperturbable, equal to themselves. Art therefore enchants and displaces at the same time; the evocative power of images always reveals, rather it discloses something, breaks balances, demolish certainties, giving checkmate to the tricks of the mind.

Stendhal knew well it: during the Florentine stage of his Grand Tour, in 1817, after visiting the Basilica of Santa Croce he began to show all the symptoms of an ecstatic syndrome. Too many emotions inside that church suddenly assaulted the French writer who, terrified by the greatness of history and the grandeur of the graves of immeasurable personalities, was taken by a kind of vertigo that forced him out of the square quickly. Stendhal writes in his travel diary: “I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, (…) Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I saw it up close- I touched it, so to speak. I had reached that level of emotion, where the celestial sensations of the arts and the passionate feelings meet. Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling”. Overwhelmed by such beauty Stendhal will have to sit on a bench and only the reading of the verses of Foscolo’s Sepolcri, which he had providentially brought with him, managed to bring him back to calm: “I needed the voice of a friend who shared my emotion”.

On the complex and fascinating theme of ecstasy, foreign artists who will take part in the new exhibition of contemporary art at the Galleria360, entitled “Ex-Stasis”, are therefore called upon to confront with it. The inauguration will take place on Friday 12th of October 2018 at 7.00 pm in via il Prato 11r Firenze. During the Vernissage a welcome cocktail will be offered while Jazz musicians will play live.

The exhibition “Ex-Stasis” proposes works that absorb, register and thus become witnesses of that beauty, of the power emitted by the artist’s body, during that ecstatic experience capable of nullifying the eternal conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, in a new harmony and cosmic communion. As Robert Schumann stated “to send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist”.

Virginia Bazzechi Ganucci Cancellieri