Can a photograph preserve the fragrance of flowers? And can paper, after years of folding, ever return to its original flatness?
These questions inspire Gift to Entropy, an installation exhibition by Italian artist Renato Leotta. It grew out of an artist-in-residence programme and serves as a prefiguration of an upcoming work at Khao Yai Art Forest.
Leotta investigates potentiality and entropy as two fundamental forces through which form emerges and transforms. He approaches form not as a fixed configuration but as a temporary condition produced by matter and energy. Light, gravity, water and vegetation become both the subjects and the agents of his work. His gestures are restrained: rather than imposing a shape on matter, he sets up the conditions for matter to reveal its own possibilities.
Flowers, films, aluminium cases and fragrance. A pile of old aluminium cases holds 16 mm films of extreme close-ups of flowers, shot so near that they seem to try to capture fragrance rather than appearance. Yet the films stay sealed in their cases, withdrawn from view like something precious. What is exhibited is the promise of their appearance and the impossible evocation of their scent.
Red paper, folds, a plexiglass case and gravity. Sheets of red paper from a Chinese paper shop, traditionally used for writing New Year couplets, are pinned inside a transparent case as tall as the fully unfolded paper. Under gravity, the folds slowly relax. Yet they will never disappear entirely, and the paper will never become perfectly flat. The work is defined not by reaching a final form, but by perpetual movement towards it.
Suspended between what is present and what remains unattainable, Gift to Entropy reveals the infinite potential of every object to transform itself.
information provided by event organizer
