Centers Thermocline Event

ADRIANO ANNINO

Centers thermocline is a project created by Adriano Annino at the end of 2015 and it exhibited for the first time on this occasion. The project, which also partially reflects Annino’s personal diving experience occurred in 2016 at the protected marine area of Portofino, is in fact the result of the artist’s work over the last two years, just following “Walls have mouths to tell”, a site specific intervention intended for the spaces of Villa Rusconi, seventeenth-century historic home in Milan.

Sometimes a transitional layer divides the sea’s upper mixed level from the calmer deep waters below. This layer is known as the thermocline, a stretch of low temperature water that influences the very perceptive state of those beings that, both from above and below, look through it in the attempt of establishing some form of interaction.
Sounds ricochet while vision is blurred out by a state of overall disorientation that might not excessively affect the relations between those who coexist in the same dimension but does however condition the judgement of those looking through the thermocline.
So what are we really facing here? The acquisition of information, interaction and communication between these two worlds is ?compromised? by this veil, this ever-changing marine barricade whose underwater law both unites and divides the elements standing on opposite sides.
Adriano Annino utterly plunged himself into the marine depths, approaching the thermocline, lowering himself into the weirding and unsettling darkness of human relations and relationships in the art world. Away from the sunlight, breathing artificially, Annino swims towards the bottom of the sea, leaving his social life behind, using each stroke to propel himself farther from the surface along a corridor of lubricated individual relations. The artist shrouds himself into an abandonment of the civilized world, embracing a marine dimension that leads to awakening, the acquisition of new perspectives and observational skills.Thanks to a process which alternates the dispersion and reappropriation of the subject, the very impulse to paint runs unbridled all throughout the canvas, giving shape and matter to a feeble, almost imperceptible yet pervasive substance.
With a view to conveying mankind’s sense of isolation at sea on canvas, the whole natural and bodily experience follows a broader reflection on the emargination of the individual in society, artistic creation and the role of the artist himself within his own working, living and swimming environment. In a famous speech by David Foster Wallace, an old fish swimming upstream greets two younger fish by asking ?How’s the water??, leaving the two speechless, exchanging astounded glances, without having the slightest idea of what their elder was talking about. Likewise, Annino is asking ?How’s art today?? and ?How’s our life??, questioning our very capability to reply to such queries. ?Clarity can be found outside? says Annino ?in what is still available, while inside it can be found in what still remains, what still affects and confuses but will however not last forever?.
We wonder to what extent does the thermocline wrap around and alter our perception: an invisible layer of lysergic predisposition surrounds us and when used to one’s advantage, like in Annino’s work, it has the power to unlock the mind’s power to look through and beyond and create moments of re-elaboration, hyperbaric chambers where the personal, social and ideological collide between the visible and existing – two dimensions that our ever progressing technological era has irreparably torn apart. It is here that the artist sets his work, it is here that he attempts to heal the gap between the two parts.
On one hand we find the inescapable arena of appearances, while on the other we sense the hidden nature of all things. In order to make each subject unique, Annino has overcome even himself, crossing the thermocline boundaries in an attempt to make his creative act the starting point for a new form of representation.