Aria dura per la finzione di uno scorcio urbano Manila – omaggio a John Cage

I determined the structure of the artwork itself with an aleatory procedure dear to John Cage: the throw of coins according to the chinese book of oracles I Ching. This book identifies 64 hexagrams, each corresponding to an “oracle” and obtained with 6 throws of 3 bronze coins on which chinese ideograms (of value 2) and eight trigrams (of value 3) are illustrated. According to the different combinations, one will obtain a sequence of lines that can be broken (Yin), or have to be continuous (Yang) and correspond to one of the 64 oracles which answer to any question asked by who is consulting I Ching. To construct my painting I decided to match an hexagram obtained by the throw of coins to each skyscraper, therefore determining, in a random way, the quantity of Yin and Yang lines inside of it. I used respectively black for the broken Yin lines and white for the continuous Yang lines. I then transcripted the number of the hexagram on every building and decorated it with a number of dots of colour correspondent to the hexagon. In those skyscrapers where the Yin prevailed the outline is black and the dots are orange, whereas in those where the Yang prevailed the outline is white with purple dots; where a tie occured, I chose grey with green dots. Lastly, on the underlying canvas I decided to use complementary colours to those of the decoration (orange/blue - purple/yellow - green/red) creating a bold contrast, while the sky is made of the sequence of all these colours arranged in 6 stripes and then blended. The final result is meant to be a perfect union of casual but rigid rules, just as John Cage wanted, but this time they are applied to painting instead of music.