Current bodies 2007
Individual exhibition - Sala Maravillas – Seville (Spain)
http://www.lucapantina.it/gallery/25/
The term reincarnation means that I am a spiritual soul that has entered a body.
In my next life I can enter another body; I can be a dog or a king.
This is a real problem for Man: how to emancipate oneself from one’s material body.
Current bodies that move and slow down their movements.
That brilliant little fire that burns within us all goes through a series of reincarnations that lead from earth to a heavenly world. (From Richard Bach to seagull)
From chaos to silence. (From prostitute to monk)
In Europe, Napoleon was in the habit of saying to his generals that, in a previous life, he had been Charlemagne. (From Charlemagne to Napoleon)
We are all one. (From married to bachelor)
8,400,000 forms of life: microbes, fish, plants, insects, reptiles, birds, beasts, man, semigod. (From microbe to man)
Joseph Beuys' relation to the animals has to be associated with an interest in myths: the hare, a central element in the work of the German artist, is also a symbol of reincarnation. (From Joseph Beuys to hare)
In his classic novel about the search of spiritual truth, Siddharta, the German Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse wrote: “He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other... None of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another." (From Hermann Hesse to Siddharta)
"I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times". Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body, degrading or elevating according to merit or demerit". Paul Gauguin
"The soul is not the body. It may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body". Giordano Bruno
"I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead". Sócrates
"Believing as I do in the theory of rebirth, I live in the hope that if not in this birth, in some other birth I shall be able to hug all of humanity in friendly embrace". Gandhi
"I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?" Jalalu ‘D-Din Rumi (Sufi poet)
"We were behaving as if we were going to live forever; this is what we all believed at the time of the Beatles, wasn’t it? What I want to say is, who thought that we were going to die?" Paul McCartney, ex-Beatle
Luca Pantina, Current bodies
Luca Pantina is fascinated by mystical personalities and ascetics on a spiritual level, but also by intellectuals and masters of strategy and philosophy. For this reason, he retrieves, in his last work of limited-issue wood engravings, the essence, the summary and the dialogue of all the characteristics of the genius, the figure and the ability to renounce all material things to go beyond the emblematic figures who have influenced, and keep influencing, the future of humanity on planet Earth. He puts on display an attractive assemblage of souls, spirits and personalities, with which he feels an affinity, connecting with his message, in the moment when it stops being an idea, to turn into a mystical, spiritual or social reality. His attitude is one of social mysticism, of a lay sprituality that is nevertheless essential, in the aspect of penetrating into the most emblematic and delicate secrets of his transcendental life. We are substances that impregnate the environment that surrounds us with musical notes, beyond the mind and the subjective elements that the left hemisphere of our brain tries to rationalise. Luca Pantina’s work spans the bodies, the matter, signs, iconographies and allegories of mystical beings, Christian as Jesus Christ himself, Gandhi, Buddha, or big men and thinkers such as Herman Hesse and overwhelming personalities such as Napoleon, to travel beyond everyday experience. They are bodies but, simultaneously, their legacy is transcendent; it goes beyond the idea and the facts, and turns into a message of light. The human being makes way for the illuminated beings, for the intrinsic force that gives them authentic reality. The idea does not matter in itself, but rather the legacy that they leave behind. Pantina’s wood engravings are expressive, structured, both capacious and physical, and, at the same time, free, in regards to the stroke, the line, drawing, outlining, submitting the conglomerate of gestures and networks to an authentic statement that overcomes the conventional limits of fine arts. Are they bodies or are they the legacy that lasts longer than their own iconographies? Should we apprehend them on the level of a signal, or allow their energy, light, ideas and message to spread without prejudging that their physical essence has evolved? The important thing is what exists in us, because we are one, because we turn matter into revelation and the revelation into a suitable way for going beyond the agreed path. The Italian creator, resident in Seville, feels part of the path walked by Miguel de Cervantes, where Zen Don Quijote makes way for his anxieties and desires towards his beloved Dulcinea. We are Don Quijote, but also his friend and page Sancho, current bodies and immortal souls.
Joan Lluis Montané
Of the International Association of Art Critics
