Within and Beyond - Looking into the Infinite: Riccardo Guarneri, Marianna Gioka, Min Woo Nam

All three artists open a window for us to meditate on our own deepest feelings and impulses in the same way that a Mark Rothko painting or a work by Pierre Soulages with its unfathomable blackness, result in us embarking on an emotional dialogue with ourselves about the great metaphysical questions of life. Although, in our contemporary art world, we appear fixated on art as a vehicle to talk about political and social questions of the day, this places a great limitation and barrier of what art can communicate. Does a great work have to be about something politically or socially relevant? All three artists in different ways present us with a window into infinity: Riccardo Guarneri with his pure, empty space, Marianna Gioka with her extraordinarily complex intricate marks which, as we stare within, presents us with a window into infinity and finally Min Woo Nam’s hazy divisions between light and darkness, land and sky or sea and sky. The miracle which great art can trigger within us has surely no limitations and artists such as Riccardo Guarneri, Marianna Gioka and Min Woo Nam exert in their more distilled and mysteriously powerful way other, profound opportunities for reflection-on our lives on this planet.