Ab Ovo

“Ab Ovo” is an interactive installation that features in an entirely innovative and original way the ancient Chinese puzzle Tangram, or “The Seven Stones of Wisdom”. As a variant on the original game’s square configuration, I proposed the oval Tangram, with rounded edges that allow for more organic shapes. Assembled and disassembled, the nine brightly colored solids form images and suggestions that get an allegorical match in the alarming news reports from the world we are powerlessly witnessing.

The totemic shape of the missile (evocative of all weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear, biological, chemical or radiological) as opposed to the irenical dove, a peace emblem, is a paradigmatic expression of the message that my work intends to convey. Characterized by highly symbolic values, the images of the egg and the snake refer to cosmogony and alchemy. The cosmic egg (the creation ‘in nuce’) around which the reptile is coiling up, is a powerful allusive picture of the dualities underlying the creation of everything in the universe. Creation / Destruction, War / Peace: in my work - entitled “Ab Ovo”, with obvious reference to the primary genetic symbol.

Tangram’s shapes, in their geometric essentialness, stimulate the visual perception of the onlooker who, breaking into the creative flow of the work, produces different figurations. By means of the game, the terrible troubles produced by current events can be exorcised thanks to a playful gesture, that is also a will to directly intervene on real life. Just move an element and the missile is no longer there; and it’s almost a dove.

The purely physical and engaging feature of the installation - an on-going performance, poles apart from the alienating virtual technologies that our digital era imposes on the contemporary art scene - and the marked versatility of the work are a decisive exhortation for onlookers of all ages to “get in the game “ and compare their own receptivity with the sensibility of the artist in order to share the repertoire of archetypal images that are always a story and a testimony of an individual and universal experience.