Passages.
Laura Vecere, Florence, March 2003

"Popper spoke about the physics of clouds and clocks, well we have now to make the physics of clouds," observes llya Prigogine in some notes written on creativity in science and art.1 The cognitive model of the cloud, at once conceptual and figurative, out forward by Prigogine provides the best introduction to a description of the distinctive artistic field in which Maria Novella Del Signore has chosen/been called to operate. An area that is hard to define, made up of fleeting passages, of ever shifting and fluctuating margins brought into being by the artist through the use of light, transparent and translucent materials to create configurations of overlapping or opposing surfaces, which deny by affirming and affirm by denying the possibility of fixing a boundary, whether conceptual or formal.
Right from her earliest works, Maria Novella Del Signore has inhabited a borderline territory, which we could also define in Prigogine's words as an area of "nonequilibrium," in which "we rehabilitate the idea of an event." And it is precisely the dimension of event, of precarious and temporary equilibrium, that dominates and in different ways aggregates the internal structure of Del Signore's work. which often takes the form of a dual system of elements bound together by a relationship of reciprocity that is as necessary as it is random. The ties that bind the different parts always remain unstable, and yet stubbornly active and effective even when we observe the direction taken by her work which, starting out from a vaporous and airy state of the material, has arrived, through a series of intermediate passages, at the most recent solid agglutinations.
In Orizzonte (1972) a black frame encloses a single image produced by the superimposition of two planes: a veil sprayed with paint and a background  on which is installed a led-diode visible at the top in the sky, while the masked light of a neon lamp illuminates the scene from below. A cross between one of Fontana's miniature theaters and a photographic light box, Orizzonte represents not so much a place as a transit between two coordinates moving with respect to one another. These determine the emergence of a spatiotemporal boundary which is always provisional. A single curved line traced to define an empty horizon - there are no mountains nor valleys nor other topographical features - describes that margin in constant transition, which moves along with the observer, while the dissolving of the iridescent colors of a twilight, in which the solitary light of a diode/star gleams, raises doubts about the moment of time represented: is it dusk or dawn? So Orizzonte is more of a statement of the uncertainty principle (which governs the work) than a picture of a landscape. The theme of the horizon as a representation of the margin, and therefore of duality, of a double edge, of a channel between two entities, physical as well as metaphorical and conceptual, returns in other forms in Del Signore's work. Specifically, we find it in the highly characterized form of the two distinct and parallel planes present in later installations like Volume (1979). Aurora (1980). Even in the Dark (1999), Two Fields (1999) and the recent Some Fields (2003).

Air
So in the first phase of her work (1971-81) what predominated was experimentation with the immaterial aspects of material. The paint, rendered nebulous and insubstantial by use of the spray gun, settled on extremely thin and almost dematerialized surfaces of silk. Out of this came the series of Volume, gaps of air enclosed between two suspended and parallel canvases that flutter at the slightest hint of movement in the surroundings. In them appear, almost as a genetic memory of the earlier.work, the curvature of a horizon that is revealed in the lower part, where the paint has not impregnated them. One red, the other blue (twilight again), the diaphanous supports of silk bear impressed in their receptive texture the matrix of a sign that is always identical and always varied, the curve of that horizon which at each slight movement of the planes is broken down and reassembled in a pattern of superimpositions, revealing and concealing its presence. As if that horizon, once represented, had come closer and been split in two, disclosing its dual identity as a threshold/opening still to be explored. Her next step, tackled with Aurora, was to penetrate into the very flow of the movement, no longer through the metaphor of a representation, but in a continuous process, entering into the circuit without beginning or end in which the event takes place. Aurora is a total spatiotemporal experience in which the sound, the color and the light follow, over the course of six hours, an unbroken wave, rising and falling, modulated by a device that links the varying of the sound to the variation in the intensity of a beam of light (from 20 to 20.000 MHz) projected onto a screen of iridescent silk that, suspended from the ceiling, hangs down to the ground. A technological night and dawn that are tinged with the ambiguous chill of Burke's "delightful horror" when they reach their peaks: the nocturnal vibration-roar and the inaudible hiss of the full light, too full, of day. "The rainbow is one color, the chromatic scale one sound."2 In this, as in the rest of her work, there is a constant input from the technical and creative ideas of Giovanni Del Signore, the primary interlocutor in a process in which the other is presented as a separate and mirror figure.

Flows
In a subsequent process of thickening, the air grows heavy and makes way for works governed by horizontality and flow. Entitled Fluidi (1997), these give shape to what is fluid and, by its very nature, lacks a predetermined form. The technology, now under experimentation in Marseilles, is that of thermoformed glass, which assumes the visual consistency of a stream of water frozen in its movement as if by a sudden glaciation, while in the deeper parts it is possible to discern water that continues to flow.
To this work is connected the Joycean, erotic-female "stream of life" of the murmuring monologue of Annaliviaplurabella. Almost a brook, rather than a bed, or better still, the long and narrow bed of a brook in which the light itself runs, sometimes flowing and sometimes stopping, thickening into shadows between the folds of the thin layers of grayish-white porcelain. The channel of the river/bed on which the porcelain is laid is suspended/set on a foaming wave of tulle, while the sound of silver bells, created by Tommaso Del Signore, 3 runs through the space of the work. Soft and hard exchange roles: rough tulle, soft-creamy-flowing porcelain, in this figuration without figures that recalls the death of Ophelia.

Precipitates
Later, as if by a process of saturation of the liquid substance, a further transition was induced, to the "precipitate" in solid form. This has produced works like Even in the Dark, Two Fields and More... and Homes.
In Even in the Dark two superimposed planes face one another: the upper. bristling with technological devices, shines light onto the lower one, enclosed in a transparent parallelepiped. The case protects a lump of wax that looks like it is writhing, contorted, made up of rises and falls, as if caught in the pangs of a birth to which the deep electronic sounds created by Tommaso Del Signore give voice.
Two Fields and More... develops and amplifies the themes of Even in the Dark. Two large white bases set at a distance serve as a support for two landscapes formed out of scattered crystal cones, arranged on the basis of a random algorithm. However, the shape of the cones is always imperfect.
Tending toward or drifting away from the ideal geometric configuration, from which they have deliberately been shifted to make them part of the world of mutation. Above these "fields," almost as if to shelter them, are suspended two perforated metal plates, fitted with scientific instruments: lenses, mirrors and electronic feeders, a sort of technological alter ego and upper limit of the world beneath.
Presented at the Museo Pecci as part of the exhibition Continuità (2002), Homes appeared to be made up of six snow-clad "nests" set on lumps of salt, shrouded by a thin cobweb of bluish lights. Here every form of life seems to have been suspended, denied, for the nests are uninhabitable, dangerous, bristling with sharp filaments of glass. But in their innermost core, in an effect that is reminiscent of Ovidio's Metamorphoses, is trapped the sound of a single repeated note, bringing an echo of distant life into that icy landscape. A faint scent of grass, released into the air from an electrically operated diffuser, recalls the color of a now lost spring.
It is important to point out that the shadow of the previous work always hovers over each "change of state" in Del Signore's work. The vision at a distance of the early days has given way to a second, extremely close-up view, as if her gaze had penetrated all the way to the confines of the material itself, revealing the gaps in it, its discontinuous and fragmentary, vibratory and changeable character. In this phase the flow of water has become a memory, drained away between the meshes of a porous material from which, by a process of karstic erosion, now emerge solid forms of an "insular" kind.
However, the new morphology of the works can be attributed to a "discovery" made by Maria Novella Del Signore and dating from the time of her spray paintings. In one of his critical writings,4 Jean-Francois Lyotard has emphasized the presence of two distinct but inextricably intertwined planes in those works. On the one hand, the transparent veil as "primary" plane of the representation; on the other, the "subordinate" and functional plane of the paper support, providing a backing for the primary one, which contained fragments of memory of the other and inscribed them in its own fibers. Very soon. the substrate of paper relinquished its secondary position and acquired a significance and autonomy of its own, when small patches of color were picked out, cut off from the general context and given an independent value by the artist, who isolated them with black and white mounts. Although profoundly different in nature, the broad and boundless space of the veil and the minimal and restricted one of the paper cutout show the signs of an identically random state. In the cross-shaped interconnection of the two levels Lyotard discerned the existence of a duality of the gaze brought into being by Maria Novella Del Signore, directed on the one hand toward the immense and on the other toward the tiny and the subcellular. The veil connotes, in the instability of the fluctuating support, the expanding universe, while the solid particle, the "cutout" of color, sucks us down into the bottomless abyss of the microscopic structure of matter.

Margins
Del Signore chooses freely from the range of techniques and materials made available by the artistic experiments carried out since the first half of the last century and now the common heritage of art. These, in turn, are constantly cut across by the dynamic relationship between order and chaos that has attracted the attention of artists working in very different spheres.
The creation of order out of chaos, central to the painting of Jackson Pollock, was actively transposed into the chilled processes of Minimalism, a development described by Robert Smithson in his article "Entropy and the New Monuments.'' 5 In the works of Sol LeWitt the reiteration of an elementary initial proposition, clear and distinct, came to be overturned in the chaotic indecipherability of the end result. Even the serial themes of the Minimalists were taken up and shifted away from their absolute geometry in the organic sculptures created by Eva Hesse: "Chaos can be structured as non-chaos"(1970). A year earlier Robert Morris had published his theories of "antiform" in the pages of Artforum. In Europe the relationship with chaotic matter had been probed as material/spiritual energy in the shamanic actions of Beyus, while out of the operations of Arte Povera, which had maintained many ties with classicism, emerged whole ranges of free procedures and the free use of materials remote from the official character of the traditional disciplines. Closer in time and in space, Salvadori and Bagnoli, responding to stimuli coming from both scientific thinking and the spiritual tradition, have tackled the paradoxical questions raised by cosmological theories and by theories on the fundamental building blocks of matter, projecting them into the dimension of the "absolute."
The sense of fragility that pervades the material - the veils of silk, the tulles, the thin membranes of porcelain, the glass, the paraffins, the sheets of acetate - shaped by Maria Novella Del Signore shows the signs of a feminine attitude toward generation. But, however much the materials utilized and the way they are used may tempt us to interpret them in this manner (the dreamy lightness of the air, the soft flow of light over a long and undulating bed of porcelain, the primordial movements of a soft material that is lifted by the heatgiven off by light-emitting devices set on a plane above, in the technological "nursery" of Even in the Dark), the morphogenesis of the works cannot be ascribed solely to a mimicry of the female. Over the course of time her work has taken on board a vision that, penetrating right into the innermost movements of the material, arrived at a supersession of genres by reabsorbing them into a pre/post-genetic state or, if you prefer, into the paradoxical multiple unity of the very beginning.
In the spray paintings the colors, made perceptible by the presence of the atmospheric casing, postulated a vertical plane of reference. They were still the legacy of a language anthropomorphically linked to an oriented point of observation: the upright posture of the human being contemplating an object.
The fixity of the point of observation had been uprooted and caught up in the dynamics of movement when the whole work assumed a horizontal trend (Fluidi, Annaliviaplurabella). So it is no accident that the change in the posture of the work was accompanied by a loss of color. The darkness in which the constituent elements of Even in the Dark and Two Fields are immersed, although necessary and functional to the installation, suggests the transfer of the work into a new dwelling place, into the pallor of the chthonic world or into the sidereal vacuum, in any case into a dimension remote from the atmospheric veil and the frequencies of color. A place of abode, that is, in which the physical anchorages have been dissolved and set free of gravity: top and bottom, right and left, are references established by convention. Consequently Del Signore's most recent works, imbued with the "unnatural" and glacial tones of black and white, appear essentially achromatic.
The passages made by the artist through the materials bear, inscribed in their folds, an implicit awareness (shared with contemporary epistemology) of not being able to count on the certainty postulated by reductionism. that matter is equivalent to an "object." The notion of object has been replaced by a new figure of reference that shows how much complexity is concealed in what seemed to have a unitary and indivisible form, starting out from that genuine crisis of belonging expressed by a particle which, as Edgard Morin puts it, "hesitates between the dual and contradictory identity of wave and particle, and can sometimes lose ail substance (the photon has no mass in its rest state)."6 The reductionist vision has given way to a new image of reality in which "All the objects of physics, biology, sociology and astronomy - atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, societies, stars and galaxies – constitute systems. [...] Our organized world is an archipelago of systems in the ocean of disorder. Everything that was once an object has become a system [...] including the atom: the atom above all has become a system." 7 What had been thought to be the basic building block of matter is no longer the unitary and solid rock of the object but the fragile porosity of a living, mobile, unpredictable and complex system.
So it is from an initial nucleus, which we would like to compare to a "creative system," that Del Signore's work moves. A system identified by the constant and binding presence of two distinct planes, metaphorical as well as objective, that define an independent and self-organizing field of gravity. The two frontiers, between which the occurrence is set out, have distinct identities and differentiated roles. They represent two different and complementary forms of knowledge. In one of the two planes it is the illuminating, logical, rational, scientific, technological, organized and descriptive function that predominates; in the other the dark, intuitive, elusive, mutable, discontinuous and oneiric function, which defies description. Out of their mutual dynamics of relationship is born the place in the middle, in which unspoken hypotheses take shape: the area of manifestation of possibilities.
Hence the prevailing practice of the two mirroring.planes can be seen as a dynamic motor, as an exercise in self-foundation of the work. So the system is presented as a sort of fluctuating cultural enclave, whose borders have been traced in the grip of a bizarre vision. As if, following a new and paradoxical geographical orientation, the boundary had slipped from the edge to the very center of the map. Conceived in this way. the system has no fixed abode (it neither designates nor occupies places) inasmuch as, having appointed the margin as its center, it is no longer situated on the periphery of any fixed "spatial center" taken as a reference. It exists in a permanent state of "marginality" whose domain of manifestation is mobility expressed in rhapsodic, intermittent, discontinuous form as the events of which the system is the theater. This once again confirms the delight the artist takes in tracing "temporary boundaries" within a territory experienced without limits, without directions, open to the incidents that outline in its passages figures with frayed edges like clouds.

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1. llya Prigogine, Einstein Meets Magritte. A study of creativity, written for a conference and dedicated to Maria Novella Del Signore. ↑
2. Maria Novella Del Signore, Aurora, 1980. Unpublished text.↑
3. This was the first of the musical contributions by her son Tommaso who, from this time on, was to collaborate on Maria Novella del Signore's works.↑
4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Principe de Chromodynamique, 1979. Unpublished text in the artist's possession.↑
5. Robert Smithson, "Entropy and the New Monuments," in Artforum, June 1996, pp. 26-31.↑
6. Edgard Morin, Il metodo, Milan, 1983, p. 125, Italian trans. of La methode, Paris.↑
7. Edgard Morin, op. cit., p. 127 ↑