Artisti fra le nuvole

Artists in the Clouds · Hubert Damisch’s reflections in his 1972 book Théorie du nuage trace a new way of investigating the history of art, which takes on a ‘symbolic form’ in the cloud. Starting from the representation of the sacred in the Middle Ages, to Renaissance naturalism, to seventeenth-century landscape painting. In their paintings Poussin and Elsheimer interpret the landscape now through the myth now with reference to the first scientific discoveries by Galileo Galilei. In the contemporary age, the cloud anachronistically illuminates the art of the past, interprets the present and projects itself into the future as emblematically revealed by the exhibition, Songs of the Sky. Photography & the Cloud at the C/O Berlin Foundation in 2022: from the photography by Alfred Steiglitz, to the nuage/cloud, but also to the studies on climatic observations by the nasa on cloud formations, to the installations of clouds in closed spaces in the Nimbus project by the Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde, up to the installation Metacloud by the French artist Vincent Leroy formed by a gigantic blue cloud floating in the Tokyo sky. So, the ‘cloud’, thanks to the thought of Hubert Damisch, finds expression, as ‘theoretical object’, in the various artistic ways and events through time.