The entire installation space will be filled with the sound of Sebastian Vimercati. A sound that brings us back to the pulse of life. Perhaps like he felt in my belly 25 years ago while creating the Energie exhibition.

Art recounts life, translating it into symbolic images of its essence. After all, art was created precisely for this reason: to send probes deep down, to intercept the fundamental dynamics of life, and thus understand it better. This was the case for EPVS, who boarded the ship of art thirty years ago to better face the sea of life, between calms and storms. However, the story of art is not composed of words, but of suggestions, intuitions, and abstractions. In the cycle of small, monochrome, and slightly discolored canvases, the space of painting becomes silent and absolute, emptied of everything except the subtle and secret energy of all things, like an intangible breath, as if color took on the substance of air. A central vertical line, marked by a silver ribbon, creates a division, manifesting its value as a metaphor. It is a limit placed within the great unity of being, a sign that gracefully interrupts the compactness of the surface, dividing it into two parts, light as wings. Here, painting becomes an allegory of an exquisitely mental flight. 

For her 30 years of artistic activity and 60 years of life, Elena Panarella Vimercati Sanseverino, aka EPVS, has conceived an installation that starts with small monochromes with silver stripes. In a rectangular space, the visitor's journey is guided by large transparent sheets of colored Plexiglas. It is a journey through colored light, a walk through a space that the viewer is invited to fill with their physical and mental presence, with their senses and thoughts, but above all with their gaze. Looking ahead, at a turning point in the path, which seems to undulate like the curves of life, the visitor will encounter large monochrome diptychs, shining with reflections, due to the Plexiglas on which a monochrome photograph has been printed. 

The shades of the dominant colors are very subtle here. The almost imperceptible changes in the color scheme are an invitation to slow down your pace and your thoughts, and to meditate on the depth contained within the surface. In these works, there is no form of real things, because there is their breath. These precious surfaces, in fact, do not illustrate what can be seen of objects, but what can be felt, in the German sense of ‘fühlen’. The soul of things does not have the form of things; the soul is abstract. But what is abstract, what is figurative? Is the blue sky abstract or figurative? Are there answers to such questions?

Let us imagine, then, EPVS's monochrome plates as many hypotheses of (inner) skies, and the plexiglass panels suspended vertically from the ceiling as transparent skies, designed to determine the visitor's path and to color the air they pass through. At the end of the path... there is the origin. The origin of EPVS's artistic journey, namely his first catalog (with a critical introduction by the author of this text), for an exhibition in the spring of 2000, exactly 25 years ago, 25 years of art and life. Its title is “Energie.” So, 25 years of energy. What is art if not energy? And so, as physics teaches us, it is also life. Energies do not fall asleep when illness intervenes. Energies are neither positive nor negative: they are unmarked flows. That is why, alongside the aforementioned exhibition catalog from a quarter of a century ago, at the end of the journey through colors, there is also an art book that recounts Elena's adventure through illness and treatment. It is a dense series of photographs, which move from the hospital horizon to that of vacation, to recount a difficult season, enriched by the energy of others: friends, relatives, and associates are all remembered in this general tribute to life, which, never more so than at this moment in the life of Elena Panarella Vimercati Sanseverino, aka EPVS, has manifested itself in a strong and composite network of relationships between people and things.

An infinite network, which also includes her son Sebastian: his is the sound that will resonate in the environment conceived by his mother for this exhibition, full of energy squared.

Guglielmo Gigliotti