Italo Calvino's Essays for the Next Millenum - Lightness

I have recently been going through a lot of my notes that i have gathered thoughout the year and I think a good way to discuss some of the ideas i have been thinking about is gathered from Calvino's writing on Lightness.

--> Art can be transformative, unbound and as Italo Calvino puts it, ‘light’. Calvino’s essay on Lightness is an exploration of the contesting dimensions of weight and lightness in relation to his own writing practice. However Calvino writes primarily about lightness in poetry and mythological stories but these concepts can be easily transferred to contemporary art practices. The writing on Franz Kafka’s The Bucket Rider (1921), is a story of a poor man who rides on his empty bucket to beg for coal, the “humble request” (Calvino, 1988, 28) that Calvino asserts is that the empty bucket requires filling or a kind of longing meaning, opening “the road to endless reflection” (Calvino, 1988, p.28) which gives a tendency for the reader to want to attach more meaning, when the bucket is not filled it lacks meaning. It could be filled with the weight of cultural significance and readers fail to accept the empty bucket as the light entity it is. This is transferrable to an encounter with art as the viewer has a somewhat anthropological need to inscribe exterior weight to intrinsically light concepts, creating a burden of meaning. 

I see my work as an intuitive process of applying one layer of paint to the next, creating a surface, yet declining a subject or narrative, the form's float on the opaque colour field, only revealing sections of the past process. The transformative nature of the work also bares a relationship with erasure. Calvino’s writing attempts to dissolve weight, suggesting that weight can be extracted and removed through a process of rejection. The viewer must have a close engagement with the works as forms will emerge and subtract, causing a flux. This subtle illusion, these forms are non representable, yet cause a state of wonder, I see this as a 'light' engagement with works as it does not get pinned down to any political or cultural meaning.