In the beginning, there was light.

But also water and fire, wax and lead, all shaped by time and the elements. In the work of the Neapolitan artist (born in 1953), the ancient power of these elements engages in dialogue with classical iconographies, exploring themes of the sacred and the unseen.

For the MAN in Nuoro, Gregorio Botta has created a new project that, drawing on his research into balance and silence, distils abstract forms within space, creating an interplay of reflections and transparencies in the material, pure geometries, raindrops, streams of water and staves punctuated by minimal shapes.

The exhibition title, Silence is so accurate, inspired by a quote from Mark Rothko, embarks on a journey where the precision of the drawing defines distant horizons and traces the passage of time through the circuits and mechanisms of small, solitary machines, as Duchamp might have described them. These absurd machines, lacking specific function, are poetic in their orchestration of movement in a vacuum, producing sounds, vapours or free-flowing writing in space.

When iron and glass, alabaster and dried flowers come together, they create intimate landscapes, enclosed architectures, and references to everyday iconography – objects, symbols and allegories of a life stitched onto waxed paper, which is consumed, worn, and transfigured in anticipation. Epiphanies and disappearances, secrets and subtle revelations, all reflect Botta’s commitment to “an art of removal, of little, of less, with the hope of reaching an art of nothing. An art that disappears, leaving only, like a vibration, like a hidden motor, the very action for which it was created.”

The imprint serves as a trace of legacy in the Pompei series, while the weight of the smoke represents the enduring presence of matter in the work that lends the exhibition its title.

Melted wax, shaped into archetypal forms, evokes Morandi-like patterns on a crystal plane that stretches infinitely in the Orizzonti cycle, where the timeless theme of the threshold carries with it the rich literary tradition exploring the boundary between the visible and the invisible, between the contingent and the immaterial.