Il velo: una metafora dell'apparire

In the wake of Walter Benjamin, the veil can be defined as that impalpable thickness in which appears – though always concealed – the truth. In this skin-like space coincide the visible and the invisible, the sacred and the profane. Thanks to some artistic pictures, above all those of the Deposition from the Cross, it is possible to emphasize the dialectics of meaning between mortal corporeality and aesthetic transfiguration of matter, between the nonsense of organic putrefaction and the bright power of truth, which turns death into a nice appearance. On closer inspection, aesthetic perception is precisely this ability to sublimate the intrinsic entropy of the matter into the instantaneous enchantment of a new shape. This process takes place above all in the impalpable thickness of the veil, threshold of the imaginal apparition where the opposites turn into one another. Blasphemous truth, after all, is typical of our time: a veilless time, void of interiority, where the transfiguring light of the veil has left the stage to the morbid and voyeuristic ¬– unveiled – look of advertisement. Hopper is the master of this profane disclosure, “sans théologie et sans promise”, the creator of an empty, dispossessed soul.