Written by Raphael Ciccarelli
Jean Arno stands out in the world of art and literature. He is recognized as an innovator in England and the United States in the field of digital arts, and his encrypted or “palimpsestic” works are now exhibited in the first Metaversal art gallery, Art & Above. Arno is the leader of the art group Astrée, which brings together artists from the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, London, and Paris. He is also the author of Trophies, a collection of poetic aphorisms, sentences, and philosophical maxims assembled in his Meditations, and of an aesthetic manifesto “Chaosism: The Art of Totality.”
Arno aims to define what could become a major philosophical, literary, and aesthetic movement in the coming years: “Every artist aspires to embody in the unity of his work the living complexity of the world—chaos within the order.” Inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s Sfumato, “Whose smoky waves incarnate the ineffable polychromy of mystery,” Jean Arno sculpts the taciturn mists of the world, gives form to the invisible, and multiplies reality in layers of meaning so that everyone can awaken to “the moving plurality of which the worlds are perpetually composed.”
“Anubis, the shadow in the mirror” perfectly represents this idea of an art which reveals itself as the glance sharpens. The shadow of the Egyptian god of the dead disappears in a halo of light; his features draw the burning letters of a symbolic poem that the spectator has to decipher. In this vertigo of shadows and light, observers can feel their world wavering as they view this being that is only ever becoming “in the infinite spiral of metamorphoses.”
The overriding concept is one of meeting: “The work is always an alchemical sublimation—a star of love, the resplendent product of a mystical embrace or a destined ‘meeting’ (…). Then swirls a world incandescent in a soul soon overcome in the creation.”
Jean arno’s artwork is an occasion to experiment, not only to contemplate. The spectator and the reader immerse themselves, travel, explore, and are summoned to collaborate. Awakened to themselves, they must henceforth look inside “to probe the dimensions of the being and life,” to analyze the sediments of the work and increase their interpretations because ” The products of art and thought always reach beyond what is obvious and call what is meant to be into existence”. Each participant seems to have a responsibility to take part in this great task, even more so than the author. After all, “We are ALL the humanity that will be.”
Website : www.jeanarno.com/home