Coincidentia oppositorum: The Works of Giovanni Anselmo between the Visible and the Invisible

Abstract

The Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo (b. Borgofranco d’Ivrea, 1934) was a member of Arte Povera group, which was put together by Germano Celant back in 1967. Anselmo has addressed the invisible in art since the beginning of his activity, mainly with projections of words that play with the idea of the visible and the invisible, with the true (or multiple) meanings of language, and with the very nature of art. He refers to universal and eternal concepts and opposite pairs, such as the visible and the invisible, the finite and the infinite, the close and the open, the clear and the blurred, the being and the non-being. In the works discussed in the paper, the intangible element of the light beam is made visible only through the projection. It is always the projection of something immaterial on something material, an entity that participates in the dimension of non-being that is projected onto the world of being.