TransParenThesis

Relative-ism

(Thesis on a Transparent Parent)

1973

mixed technique 94x124x10 cm (LED internally lit)

“Daddy-cated” to a thesis on a transparent parent and his daughter

Einstein’s theory of relativity asks us to consider space and time together as ‘spacetime’.

Long before this, Heraclitus of Ephesus argued that the unapparent is often more influential than the visually tangible; and references to nihilism in modern philosophy, from Nietzsche onwards, evoke absence and nullity as a means of restoring the possibility of its opposite. Jacques Derrida deconstructed the ‘metaphysics of presence’, asserting that absence is also a form of presence. Being is thus delineated by absence.

Looking at this picture, one might consider Antoine de Saint-Exupery: ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye’. The issue, however, is not clear-cut, and so a transparent father is positioned in parentheses alongside his daughter, as if to make a thesis of a parenthetical statement.

In a psychological approach to the picture, once a child grows up and has understood a parent’s mentality and motivations, he is prepared to ‘forgive’ and treat his relationship with that parent as a mere parenthesis in his own personal and emotional evolution.

This piece encapsulates Lorenzo Scaretti’s ‘modus operandi’ – as elucidated in the Explanatory Notes. It is a perfect example of a Western assembly-line alphabet transformed into Eastern pictograms or ideograms or Egyptian hieroglyphics, which use symbols, rather than abstract letters, to represent the physical world. So, here there are multiple meanings in each word which forms the title – trans; transparent; parent; thesis; parenthesis (brackets !) – which both take meaning from and give meaning to the image itself. Word and symbol are inextricably bound together.