Artificial Horizons

Technological aesthetics and conceptual art: this is probably the most current challenge and the most difficult combination in the contemporary visual arts scene. Michele Lostia faces this challenge in 12 works, with minimal variations and subtle connections, that seem to vibrate on a musical rhythm and that make up the exhibition "Orizzonte Artificiali", from May 5 to June 16.

These are six large aluminum works in which a light tape containing phosphor and silver powder has been used. Electricity illuminates the series of bands creating a hypnotic effect. In the smaller works in cardboard, the artist has applied opalescent adhesive strips which, against the black background, provide a contrast that assimilates them to the larger works.

In reality, the references are multiple: first of all, to the instrument of the artificial horizon that airplane pilots rely on in their cabins during navigation. The same luminescent tape, a high-tech material, is used for route directions inside aircraft. "There needs to be total confidence from the pilots in this tool," Lostia explains. His research into aeronautical technology, however, also transcends into a philosophical field, as happened in the past with the videos of the Fluxus artists and today with the Japanese artists of the Dumb Type collective, seen at the last Venice Biennale in the Japanese pavilion, an environmental installation suspended between tradition and information technology.

The surfaces crossed by Lostia's bright lines connect instead to the trigrams and hexagrams of the Tao and Chin, interchangeable lines that trace human destinies on an inner horizon. The horizon is always illusory, that of the senses and that of the pilots in their cabins and even that suggested in the Chinese hexagrams. The horizon serves perhaps to keep us in balance. With grace and simplicity as the works of Michele Lostia show us, whose aesthetic thread brings the memory to the minimalism of Donald Judd and to the neon rhythms of Dan Flavin. And he asks the spectator to mirror himself, with confidence, in his own horizon.