Alberto Pavan Art

Themes, inspirations and content

I left my employment in the drug and action field, because the changed that my job was subject, in the past ten years, no longer reflected the spirit and the drive that made me choose to be involved in this kind of work.

When I stopped working, however, I still had a strong interest in people and their behaviour. And, if not in a therapeutic sense, i wanted, at least to be able to observe it and illustrate it. Art seemed to be the obvious choice.

The themes that have been influencing my work are as follow:

1

Changing of one’s reality

The strongest drive to create, for me comes from my believe of the interdependence all individuals share with their own reality, environment, understanding of truth. In the last century, since Quantum physic has entered in our available knowledge, matterin the traditional, newtonian sense, has been accepted to be an illusion. What we perceive as solid matter is in fact, a wave of moving particles and like the ripple effect one can see when throwing a stone in a lake all matter also matter behaves in the same way. If one throw a second stone in the same lake, the ripple effect of the new object will eventually untangle itself with the ripple off the previous throwing, creating a new, different pattern of waves. In the same way we all untangle with what is all around us. With everything we do, we give life to a different untangling with other waves of matter. The one-ness with our environment is much more physically real than we have ever thought. As a consequence, our changes affect the entire universe. This universe is this way because the choices we made and it will change according to the choices we will make. In our immediate surrounding, we have our brain that has evolved in a way that protects us from stress and potential chaos. We can state that the brain aims at the maintaining of the present as it is, because it is perceived by it as the safest option. But, if we believe that the brain is us, we wouldn’t have any change, ever, as the brain works against it. However, our consciousness often push for change, against the brain. But where is the consciousness then? Please do not think that I am thinking of any god when I talk about consciousness as external to the brain.. It can be located externally without having the need to be attached to a god,

2

Consciousness

i The awareness of the self, the passage from sentient beings to conscious and self-aware being is still a subject of controversy and it is discussed at a great extent by neurologist, scientist and philosopher. Despite the vast knowledge about the functions of the brain , science is unable to point out why the production and movement of hormones and neurotransmitters from different organs to different parts of the brain causes, for example, sentiments of love, hate of friendship.

Evolution has favoured species that understood the importance of collaboration. But canines did not feel. The need to attach romantic feelings to their instinct of acting as a pack. Human-kind has developed a step further, we have developed the ability to retain the abstract concept of collaboration and we differentiate it from a pack by theorising over the different types of collaborations: the community, the family, the fatherland, the congregation, the society. We have extrapolate the essence of the instinct of cooperating and given to it different functions, meaning, qualities. We can plan, describe, theorise, predict over the instinct of collaboration. The relieve of dopamines when we encounter our ideal mate for procreation was, is, described as love and just this basic instinct of spreading our genes was transformed by our being conscious as one of the most profound, discussed, romanticised sentiment .

We have extrapolate from a mere instinct, complex sentiments and feelings love, hate, friendship, sadness, and so on. Self-awareness has made us, a species with intrinsic disadvantages, the dominant species in our planet. We don’t have claws or teeth to defend ourselves, we are not covered with a natural layer of fur or feathers that protect us from cold weather, we are ridiculously slow runners and our offsprings need years of care before they can be self-sufficient…Nevertheless we managed to successfully avoid extinction and claim up to the evolution ladder. It appears that our survival is linked with our self-awareness, which facilitates the ability for planning, remembering, theorising and that is our main asset over the rest of the animal kingdom.

Before medicine biology and neurology were able to demonstrate how our brain works and what it does, the belief was that us, mankind was believed to be in possession of a soul. The soul was considered the locus of our personality and our consciousness. Such soul was believed to be connected to a god who was believed to give us free will and then punish us for using it.

From the 18th century to these days, with the increasing of our knowledge of the universe and how it works, the need for a god has been made more and more obsolete.

In these days, to put in the picture a god, would be unthinkable because such character would be completely outside all the rules that science has postulated and he/she/it would be subject to so many unanswerable questions that makes the existence of such being impossible.

So, excluded the god, we still have the puzzlement of self-awareness, where does it come from? Why did we not stop to being sentiments, like the pack of wolves? Sure evolution is strictly involved, but it is not enough.


With Einstein, some of the fundamental pillars of traditional physic were seriously shaken up, by doubting the reliability of gravity’s behaviour and of the objectivity of time.

Another massive blow came with the Quantum theory. The fact that matter was no longer tangible, no longer factual, resulted in the opening up of a Pandora’s box that nobody wanted really open. To have to accept that what it has always been consider as tangible certainty was no longer credible surely rocked the boat of materialism. the solid ity of our material world turned into an elusive wave of energy in constant movement.

With the acknowledgement that matter doesn’t exist, not in the way we have understood it up to now and, a molecular level it behaves in a way physicists would have never been able to predict, the very essence of reality has taken a blow. Because of the vast knowledge at an individual level of how Information Technology works, scientist have been able to spread this knowledge fast and take examples from it. Our human brain has been compared to a VCR Head-set. Such tool , once we wear it, will give us access and allow us to interact with a virtual world. But we all know that the head-set is not the essence of the Virtual world. The brain is supposed to have the same function, making the essence of consciousness to be located externally.

One thing is sure a; our experience of reality is a close circuit and one way only. We erroneously think of our eyes as two windows on the external world, In fact they only report to the brain informations received as impulses that could be made of the same structure of a programme that allows us to interact in a VR world. What send the impulses to our brain which then it translates on the familiar shapes we call real, could be nothing more than a programme.and what we see as external, is, in fact, an internal process.

Ontological mathematicians have been able to put down on paper a formula that represents self-awareness by making the last external to the equation, where materialist haven’t been able to put the brain at the centre of our understanding of existence.




3

Expressionism

. A new artist might be blamed to hide a lack of technique by styling oneself as a new expressionist. But the need to express my reality as I experience to concern myself with being faithful to an objective reproduction of reality. Also, for that, there is Photography. I have chosen some clear expressionist approach because it gives me the opportunity to adapt my skills to portray exactly what I am experiencing. I am painting in a style that is a cross between comics making, caricatural portray, fashion illustration and and the pictures one can find in fairy tales children books. Reality is pregnant with onírico qualities. Reality is ambiguous, reality is not real, reality is a synthesis of what our senses cook up for us in our brain. All experience that humanity experiences as objective, are, in fact, a subjective elaboration of the information received by our surrounding, filtered through our 5 senses and interpreted by our brain.

Scientists theorise that the way we see this reality is not as it really happen to be. It is comparable to a computer’s desktop. We all know that our desktop presents icons which allow us to complete actions. We know, for example that by clicking on the symbol of a trash can, we get rid of documents, unwanted emails and so on. We do not believe that a trash can is really inside our laptop, however, that logo allow us to quickly complete operations at the pressing of a key. If we had to learn the program which allow our laptop to dispose of unwanted items , our action would be challenging and time consuming. Reality may fallow a similar dynamic. What we see is the simplify version of what’s really there. A mere logo, an icon. Natural selection has evolved us to see a simplify version of what surround us in order to manage it. Like in a videogame. In order to survive and pass to the next level, the player needs to kill the enemy or to collect prices or exit labyrinths. If the player was left to deal with the program itself that takes him to the next level, he would be killed or eaten by the adversary. What the player needs, it is a quick way to be able to grab the right tools to progress, without being killed or eaten. There is no need to be familiar with the program that is behind the action that make us win the game. It is documented that different species have a different input on the surrounding they live in. Colours get perceived differently, the senses are developed in a different way. We think that, because we think we are more evolved than other species, we have been given the gift of seeing the truth, but this is an overestimation of our capacities, probably a leftover of the superiority complex that religion left us with. For millennia we have been told that everything was made for us by benevolent gods (or god), that we were the favouriteof superior being that looked after us. Now we know that it is not so. Any astronomer can tell us how insignificant we are. However, the experience we live is unique in our Galaxy Probably unique in all this universe. It may not be unique, however in the next universe and the next and the next and the next for infinity. In these days, in fact, we talk about multiverse where in a never ending of nothingness there are never ending bubbles of something.. these bubbles contain many galaxies, each galaxy may contain at least one planet with the conditions for life. I am stopping here

4

Esoteric elements

Aristotle declared that reality was a mathematical expression. Pitagora described our perception of reality as if a group of individuals were born in captivity, tied up to a surface and in front of them was a white screen. Just behind them, actors and animators were moving shapes of animals, or they acted some action. Behind the actors there was a fire producing light that created shadows, thanks to the shapes moved by the actors on the screen viewed by the prisoners. These last, not having known any other reality, not having anything to compare their experience with, grew old believing of living immerse in reality, when what they had was just a simulacra of it. When one of them freed himself and was able to leave the underground cave to explore the world above, he was mesmerised and returned to the cave to free his companions, but when he arrived back and told them about his experience, he was received with scepticism, disbelief, sarcasm and also aggression. The community did not want to question what they had believed to be true. The Illuminati, one of the most ancient secret societies, believed in a similar type of reality. They believed that religions, all of them, had two meaning:one was literal, to be propagated amongst the humble and the non-initiated one other, symbolic, that was an alternative reading of the sacred books based on symbology they could interpret and could give to the scripts a very different meaning. The books themselves were many. In the 4th century DC, the Roman Emperor Constantino, needed to unify his domain under the Cristian religion, he needed to end the different interpretations of the new religion and consolidate it into one. He invited all his bishops to decide on one doctrine to be the official and persecuted ll the believers in anything else but that, he burned all the other Gospels, all the Old Testament that contradicted the agreed version and effectively, made Christianity how we know it now. But the many versions of it contain very different understanding, very different meaning, including the one in which the god of the Judeo Christian faith, Jehovah, is not the omnipotent god he wanted to be, but a minor god, a war god, vain, jealous and very violent, who trapped humanity in hell (this would be hell) to serve him and blindly worship him. Of course all these stories have been written as metaphors, as symbols to make a very obscure message to be understood by the simple minded. Nobody should believe that such characters have ever been real. There was, however, a character that may have been a real person: Hermes Trismegistus. The first philosopher, father of Alchemy and the occult, influencer of most religions and beliefs. His ideas have been the base for many of the secret societies and his 7 principals are a good code of rules applicable to reality, many of which, have been backed up by modern science.

5

Folklore

Like for the previous source if inspiration, I see folklore as an expression of the people “secret knowledge”. Folklore it’s imbibed with ritual and symbology and it is often a representation of an ancient culture that needed to be disguised as something entirely different, often ion history, to escape persecution and prosecution. In my Brazilian production I had the fortune to closely witness the daily relationship the people has with the worshiping of saints or protecting against mythological figures, which, like for religion, should be interpreted as Jungian archetypes of human behaviour, but that, too often, are taken literally, often as a self-inflicted punishment for the sins of the powerful.