Paolo Ambrosio presents
Roland Barthes' "The Empire of the Signs" is over twenty years old and still presents considerably interesting issues. One of the most important aspects of the work is the idea that signs are absolutely autonomous units which can, however, build up complex systems of symbolic referents, with metamorphosis as a fundamental characteristic. Signs are both known and unknown at the same time. This dichotomy, in fact, defines the irreducibility of the signs themselves. Signs are known because they are immediately recognisable. They are unknown because they cannot be ultimately identified as units and can proliferate arduously in unplanned ways to create an asemantic script in which motions of the soul are assimilated to concepts. Above all, I believe the
governs perception through a slow, gradual but inarrestable process of becoming. This process allows skidding from one structure to anotessentiallyher, in a drive to move somewhere else. In other words, it is a sort of fugue towards the indistinct.
i.e. has always manifested a form of natural vitality in combining and integrating messages. Paolo Ambrosio's aesthetic discourse engages this culture of signs which can be interpreted as an expression of originality. Paolo Ambrosio never drifts away in the register of gestuality but rather tends to excite associations of thought and sensitivity. Signs -which can be dry, fragile, firm, or turgid, accordingly- always express their vocation to build different languages, finally leading to hybridising with sculpture and architecture. From this point of view, a book-object is nothing more than the visualisation of the intrinsic property of signs of becoming something else, thus overcoming defined and standardised limits of the media.
M. Heidegger declares that a speaker is set in language. The language of signs proceeds by means of
Language is, in fact, a product of conscience which "distils" possible realities though multiple filters and layers. It is a trace, a residue, a ductus, a clue. The main strategy of language is that of picking from the origins of space and time to re-found memory and give breatth to experience. Gleams of light and perceptive constellations are highlighted in this process. Colour becomes an aggregating factor. Signs make colours vibrate. Colours dilate signs in the name of freedom which deranges any pre-set direction.
As a consequence, I like defining Paolo Ambrosio's work as
His work, in fact, recall places of the spirit which can be represented by means of infinite variations and contacts which dissolve and then re-compose in an existential and formal maze.
