In my time, I hear more and more often the questioning of the existence of the soul. It is replaced by the concept of the neuroscientific view that everything is a projection of a complex system of neurons that through electrochemistry creates sensory effects, which means that we “feel”, something that until now we have placed in two general categories: signals that were the result of the 5 senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell) and those that we did not know where to classify, so we called ‘feelings’, premonitions, hypersensitivity, and others.
Today we are contemplating that more than 32 senses might exist, including the sense of balance, our body in the space around us, temperature, light detection, sense of reality…
What is our mental reality?
Is it different from the sensory one?
Do we share it, so that through the confirmation and the people around us can we be sure that it exists?
How is the reality of a work of art defined? Does it exist? Is it arbitrary?
I believe that a large part of the mission of a work of art and consequently of an artist is the creation of one or more realities within his work. The degree of communication with the audience relates beyond aesthetics to the way in which these realities are communicated. When we say so repetitively and banally ‘he took me with him’, ‘he took me on a journey’, in essence what we are trying to say is that the reality of the work also became mine for the duration of the work.
Why is this necessary? To escape from our own?
Let’s try to answer another, much older question: Why do we need stories? Why have people since prehistoric times resorted to storytelling, fairy tales, illustration, creation? In other words: why did they feel that they would like to change their reality, or expand it?
To inform, to discover, to share, to create concepts beyond the visible universe.
Why is the visible universe so limiting?
Perhaps its interpretation is. The simplistic finite depiction in 3 dimensions of a space with infinite dimensions, through signals from 5 senses, makes things colorless, tasteless, unholy, unworthy of real significance.
Exposure to more realities – the reality of the ‘other’, in whatever sense the ‘other’ has in our lives – possibly opens up avenues for us to explore universes outside our 5, 7, 32 senses.
For lack of a better definition, we call this space: mental, psychic, hyper-realistic, magical, etc.
What is the way each artist creates realities and universes? Well, that’s the real question – a real quest – for each artist… (more in other posts…)
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