- PENSARE CON LE MANI -

Visual Bioart Exhibition
Artètika Palermo

Lorenzo Li Greci
by Gian Mauro Sales Pandolfini [Palermo, 4 January 2023]

The hands have guided reason since immemorial time. Their imprints on the walls of caves are the embryo of human life that becomes conscious and acts on the world.
With them we have learned to understand the world, in the sense that we have made it ours, embraced it in its entirety of its expressions. The thought, therefore, must be originally recognized in the hand and then in the brain that used it as a cultural organ.

Lorenzo Li Greci is a young man from Palermo, a biotechnologist in Finland and an artist everywhere he would be able to combine the scientific aspect with the creative one, the empirical hand with the metaphysical one, shattering the horizon line with which our eye needs to orient itself in the sea of life. A bit in the manner of the masters of the past, such as Leonardo or Dürer, who combined the painting into a scientific instrument, useful for investigating and revealing mysteries of nature and the human soul.

The works of Li Greci tell of nature, because, he himself tells us, «there is no substantial difference between creating a work of art and carrying out an experimentation protocol: both contribute to the pursuit of the same objective, to describe reality in its aesthetic and performative components, in any case natural». His creative path, linked to the informal, to abstract expressionism but also to the visionary reinterpretation of traditional figurativism, makes use of natural colors and materials synthesized in the laboratory, such as lignin, essential for make the paper waterproof but incredibly suitable for creating original and suggestive chromatic nuances.

These are the declinations of his bioart, aimed at the search for aleatory effects, in which our imagination can sail free between microscopic enlargements of details stolen from nature, be they barks, minerals, fragments of sky and sea, archaic cave roughness or enchanted and fairy-tale forests. In the unusual solar cyclicity of that polar region where night and day seem to go on forever, Li Greci has his bio-atelier, where, with an ironic and playful attitude, but also experimental and mathematicially, he recreates panical and dreamy abstractions that let themselves be seduced even by the phrasings of great masters of Italian Mannerism such as Pontormo.