XAVERIO’S QUANTUM AESTHETICS

Gregorio Morales

Like a subatomic physicist Xaverio decomposes material in its infinitesimal parts. He works with precious and semi-precious stones (quartzes, rubies, saffires, onixes, beryls, corals, amethysts, turquoises, pyrites, acuamarines, malachites…), which are carefully pulvarized in a mortar and then extended over the wood with the help of pigmented resins in different mixtures, producing unimaginable tones and colours. In this way he creates his work of art: From the most elementary particles. This process requires a careful and difficult operation in which the support passes through various stages until it reaches the desired texture.

Xaverio’s world is the world of the microscopic. He is one of the few artists who understands the language of the infinitesimal, where in a strange communication with particles he converts them in his allies. In this way he can summon them when he wishes and, knowing that in nature everything tends towards complexity, groups them en atoms, in cells, in consciousness and in knowledge. Following the ideas of Eddington, material becomes something ‘mental’.

Thus, what Xaverio achieves in his studio is a never ending search for the ‘philosophical canvas’, i.e. a canvas which transmutes daily experience in something vivid, intense, full, which finds the gold of existence in what we think is mud. The painter, who loves the creation of new words in which various meanings are united, calls this philosophical canvas a ‘petral’. This term has the advantage of simultaneously alluding to something philosophical and also something mineral. What better way to reflect, among other things, the mental aspect of material !

And since matter is part of the mental, among its properties is adapting itself to our thought. This ability of matter to conform to the image and semblance of our psyche is one of its most mysterious qualities, which subatomic physics has discovered. Mind and material instead of two distinct things would be only two manifestations of some common thing which we still ignore. Thus, matter is intelligent like consciousness. With this we abolish the traditional distinction between the inert matter of things and the wisdom of man. Xaverio knows this from his descent to the infinitesimal subworld: Each particle is a being with its own will. Thus, the surfaces which unfold before us are thinking surfaces and not in the manner of the written word, which fixes a thought forever, but in the real way of the mind, changing and progressing.

Personal experience is intrinsic to art and to the quantum way of life. Everyone of Xaverio’s surfaces or compositions induce the spectator to search for himself. Such a search is one of the basic objectives of quantum aesthetics, in which each woman or man must become theirselves. Art should stimulate this search and Xaverio’s work does this extremely well. Exposing his naked moods, the spectator sees in them the story of the artist’s individual development and is motivated to follow him beyond the limits which he has explored, to run the same risks and find similar treasures.

Xaverio’s work contains innumerable mysteries. Each ‘petral’ is an emission of energy waves, which behave like a chromatic spell, producing sensations and concrete moods in the spectator. Our perception of the visible world is related to a particular colour and each one of the colours we perceive is directly related to our inner world. Xaverio has the power of penetrating in both worlds, that of matter and colour and that of man and his psyche. Therefore it’s not unusual that his canvasses affect our most intimate feelings.

 But the possibilities are not exhausted here. Xaverio also acts with his ‘petrals’ like an experienced novelist or expert psychologist, since the combinations of colours and surfaces can produce the most varied recreations of the human character and thus, one group of ‘petrals’ we could call Othello and another Hamlet or Don Quijote, because each character and each personality is an amalgam of different waves in eternal progression and change on the one hand, although in a paradoxical stability on the other.

What the artist is proposing to each of us is an internal adventure. He makes us enter in an immense jungle, not to show us new and original landscapes but to serve as a stimulus in a search for our own landscapes, which no one has ever seen or ever will, because individual development presupposes that a man and a woman who are absolutely unique are reborn from the common clay. Therefore the important thing is not the first image we see on contemplating these surfaces, but the after-image which operates as a faithfull portrait of our psychic structure. Xaverio’s canvasses are suggestions of routes to follow. We can go in the direction indicated by certain colours or vibrations or in another direction. Grouping different works or colours we can construct the mandala that represents us. In this way his ‘petrals’ should be acquired one by one in order to group them together in our living-room or in our studio, composing the image of our destiny.

If we individuate we are growing. We are becoming more complex than what we were, therefore different. But in a mandala everything is contained, from the collective, gregarious and egoistic adolescent to the conscious solidary individual of old age. The mandala is a structure which gives meaning and integrates each of the moments of a life. In spite of solidity and perfection of its structure we must not forget that in the universe and within men stability coexists with continuous movement, movement which either goes against entropy and towards complexity or against complexity and towards entropy.

The best image of a mandala is a circle, which at the same time is the most perfect representation of ourselves and the universe. Xaverio’s different coloured circles, like those in the collection called "blue material" are fascinating. We can lose ourselves in them as if we were lost in our unconscious or in the immensity of the cosmos. When we spend some moments of contemplation, the dimensions begin to transform themselves and a new strange fourth dimension opens up, which projets us far from ourselves and leads us into the forbidden and irresistable kingdom of the unknown. Like the universe Xaverio’s paintings are fractals, which means the part is similar to the whole, so that an enlargement, no matter how big is indistinguishable from the rest. But also, the texture of some of them become so uniform that the fractal character approaches a hologram: any part can explain the whole. In the opinion of David Bohm this seems to be the nature of the universe: Information interconnected like the neurons of a brain and in the same way as the brain any unit of information contains in itself a reproduction of the whole. The works of Xaverio are an invitation to find the part in the whole and vice versa.

It is obvious that in this direction, Xaverio goes beyond the apparent reality of things, distinguishing again, with David Bohm, an unfolded order and an unfolded order. The first would be the universe as we know it. The second, the deeper and unknown order, which our eyes see as chance and extraordinary events. Xaverio penetrates in the folded order of reality by means of a triple procedure: On the one hand he discovers the most subterranian vibrations of the material, its energy waves, wich produce states of mind or consciousness. An example of this is his installation "Space of stillness", where the surfaces which unfold before the spectator attempt to elicit in him a state of serenity, relaxation or even dreaming.

Another thing that Xaverio does when he descends to the depth of hidden reality is to liberate the folded order of each individual, so that this can enter in its most secret patterns. Because of this, we have said before, that some of his compositions could be called Hamlet or Don Quijote or Othello.

In third place Xaverio allows himself the luxuary of acting in reverse or folding the unfolded order, hiding the visible, as he does in his series ‘Cheops’; base, edge and height of the famous pyramid. He realizes the most varied and singular compositions with them. We can say therefore and with total security, that in each one of these compositions the pyramid of ‘Cheops’ is present, crouching and ready to explode like the universe of the microscopic. This identity between universe and conciousness, matter and spirit, subjectivity and objectivity are magistrally manifested in Xaverio’s work. The artist makes "coiunctio oppositorum" with all of the elements. The opposites unite in his world in a way that is unthinkable in the ordinary world of logic. That is to say for the quantum-artist binary thought has been substituted for "blurry thought". A and not A can exist at the same time. Here is the hidden truth of nature: Alongside of our universe there are other universes. And none exclude the others. All are true. This flowing of worlds constitutes one of the fundamental motives of the plastic expression of Xaverio that show us in the same composition the simultaneous existence of very diverse realities.

But of these infinite universes which flow next to us it is man who with his simple observation chooses and creates one of them, which represents perfectly the surfaces made by Xaverio. On the one hand, if we stand before them they appear homogeneous, pure and simple with a permanent and defined structure. But if we move around them, everything before our eyes moves and changes. The act of observation modifies the observed.

In such a world only the spectator and especially the spectator in movement is who creates his own work of art. The only thing the artist does is put before him the diverse materials to use. The spectator chooses and in his retina constructs his own reality. This is what Xaverio proposes with an installation whose models, with every type of variation repeat themselves once and again in his exhibitions: "Colours for strolling". The artist places before us a combination of colours as in three colour stroll, where he joins red, black and blue. At the beginning these colours seem extremely dark, far away and alien, but as soon as the spectator starts to move the most fantastic rainbows are unfurled before him. Colour and movement, vibration and colour, position and reflexion: all is one. According to the point of view of each viewer or wherever they stop or concentrate their attention for a few minutes they will be giving form to a completely different world. There will never be two viewers who see the same effect.

Then the obverver become the center of the universe. Without him the work of art would keep its jealously protected secret; everything would remain in the first second of the universe and there would be no creation, life or art. A figurative painting can be a beautiful universe, but it’s a dead universe. The ‘petrals’ are this very universe in expansion and continuous creation.

This is what one of the most important, strange and subversive laws of subatomic physics tells us: the principle of complementarity. According to this principle a corpuscle can behave as a wave or a particle, depending on the type of observation carried out. In the same way that in Xaverio’s work, each observer creates his own work of art, each investigator determines the result of his experiment. This is not fiction, to the point that this quality is known by the name of the Hawthorne-effect.

 As a consequence many of Xaverio’s surfaces represent the possibility of entering in this state of complementarity or lifegiving chaos, assuming the fullness of the moment and the cosmic potential that this brings with it. When we don’t split ourselves when we assume ourselves wholly, when we don’t fear, when we don’t wait, we are everything.

When man becomes once more the measure of all things, his interior will be the prime objective. Xaverio tries to reach the innerworld of man, not only through sight, but also through other senses. For this reason taking his installation "colours for strolling" to the extreme he plants to add to the ‘petrals’ hung on the walls a flloor with different tactile surfa"colours for strolling" to the extreme he plants to add to the ‘petrals’ hung on the walls a flloor with different tactile surfadirty realism, Xaverio reconstructs before us a modern world of ideas. Can there be a greater provocation?

Here is then what Xaverio’s work poses for us: A voyage to the common magma from where both matter and consciousness emanate. That is a voyage to the unconscious, to the morpho-genetic fields or the archetypes, whose secret geometry appears before us just by contemplating the work. It’s what his surfaces, and the different mixtures and forms he achieves with them, represent. As Plato demanded of the candidates who wanted to enter in his academy: "No one enters here who doesn’t understand geometry." Xaverio’s work embraces geometry and in this way makes present to us the hidden pattern in whose image nature is ordered.

For Xaverio, as in subatomic physics, separation doesn’t exist. The universe is a continuum, where the most distant parts can be instantly related. Everything, from the nearest to the most invisible limits is interconnected. For us, it’s enough to look at one surface to submerge ourselves in the most far-off regions in the cosmos. His colours also are in a state of permanent interconnection, not only because those of one wall establish ties of contemplementarity, integration, fusion or repulsion with those of the other, but also because in this way all the ‘petrals’ both on one side and the other, those above and those below compose a total work. But besides this Xaverio employs a procedure of staining the back of the frames with various fluorescent tones, so that when he hangs them on the wall, they give off a strange and luminous halo, which when joined to that of other paintings composes a chromatic symphony where every surface behaves like a particle, which joins others to produce the miracle of matter.

Possibly Xaverio has created with his work, in an artistic way and anticipating science, the final theory, which unites the world of the microscopic with that of the macroscopic. When looking at his surfaces both things seem equally possible and convincing to us. The minimum expresses the maximum. The maximum, the minimum.

 Xaverio’s work expresses the real movement of the universe. For the first time, instead of the perspective prejudicing the contemplation of the work it helps us to enter into one of its different dimensions. His services express a fruitfull union of opposites. We are in the presences of fascinating directions among the many possible ones in quantum-aesthetics. It unites in itself the mistery with the singularities. With these intentions Xaverio has created a new art. An art that radically breaks with any previous mold and which penetrates in the unknown, in search of unsuspected dimensions. Dishumanized art becomes human. Without having to embrace necessarily figuration or abandon pictorial experiment. The observer is encouraged to explore other fields of consciousness just as real as, or more so, than those of which we are conscious.

From

Xaverio. Estética cuántica. Petrales 1997-2000,

Caja de Granada, 2000.Spain.