“Nature loves to hide” is the famous and enigmatic “fragment” with which the Greek philosopher Heraclitus urged human beings to look beyond appearances and reach the essence of things. This search for truth, if you will, is also inherent in the work of artists, who through their artworks seek to arrive at a possible interpretation of the world and its mysteries.
This is also what the two young sculptors, Pierpaolo Arcadio (2000) and Vito Lippolis (2000), explore in the exhibition Intuitive Skies, in which they present the site-specific installation works Guardians of the Dark and Cosmographic Sky, created specifically for the third edition of Lo Stato dell’Arte Festival (2026).
The content of these artistic projects is connected to the theme of this year’s Festival, entitled “The Stone and the Stars. The Light Rediscovered,” with its clear reference to the ancient relationship between humankind and the firmament a relationship once intimately connected to existence itself and now threatened by excessive urban lighting (so-called light pollution), which has altered this bond, including in relation to the natural rhythms of life.
The stars, protagonists of the night sky, have been a primary source of inspiration for writers and visual artists alike. In literature, the most famous example is certainly Dante, who, not coincidentally, uses the word “stars” to close each of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy (Inferno: “and thence we came forth to see again the stars”; Purgatorio: “pure and ready to rise to the stars”; Paradiso: “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”). “Dim, distant stars of Ursa Major…” wrote Leopardi in the celebrated opening of Le Ricordanze; while, in the visual arts, who could fail to recall Van Gogh’s extraordinary and haunting The Starry Night?
Contemporary human beings, so absorbed in the hyper-connected speed of life, with their faces increasingly turned toward the luminous screen of a smartphone (which has become a veritable prosthesis of the body), have now lost the memory of that relationship with the stars. The stars seem even more distant and silent than they once did, when they were questioned as we do today with artificial intelligence and observed on a daily basis as a compass and guide for existence.
