From the horizon of the one you loved, you return to fully inhabit the visual field. It happens like this. On an ordinary day. Without notice.
It has a strange effect when you realize that you are holding the massive armored door of your heart open with one foot and that you keep holding it open. It is you who allow the blazing light of emotions to filter inside, beyond the blurry shadow of the dark alleys where you were hiding. You don't quite understand why you do it. You just know that you feel an excitement doing it. It doesn't cost you any effort. You don't even wonder why you don't close it. In fact, you don't run away. You feel only the new and urgent need to show yourself openly. - It can't be true - you tell yourself.
A breath of fresh air bursts into your life and sniffs you out from behind the scenes. You rediscover yourself hungry for emotions. Understand that the inner world can be lived and not just described. You even let go of the worry about the ending. It matters little. What matters is to live it. In a continuous shock.
You no longer feel love as a threat but as a real possibility of encountering the world of the other, without macroscopic distinctions: you find the courage to approach it. You no longer worry about protecting your borders from the onslaught of a concrete presence: you agree to investigate the tortuosity of your life, sharing them.
You climb over barriers. You abandon yourself to the enchantment of the moment. You reach out with a smile beyond the line of memories. Pushed by an irrational unleashing of your impulses, you pour yourself completely away from your asphyxiated family habitat. Push your limits a little further. A step beyond the tangle of feelings that have remained entangled in the memory in a more or less latent form. Beyond the lacerations, doubts and insecurities. Beyond the forest of question marks that had kept you company behind the windows from which you continued undeterred to observe the world. Beyond the contradictions, ambivalences and despair inherent in a difficult and troubled love. Beyond that melancholy mood that had been the background to the ever-changing flow of days. Beyond the painful and resigned awareness, the chilling fear and the bewilderment of loss. Far from the discomfort that miraculously ceases to be such.
You pass from the ground of alienation directly to the stage. You abandon the guise of an impassive observer and those of an unfinished character. You return to the scene. You do it as a protagonist this time.
You pass from the closed door of the heart to the open door of the soul. Without running away from something, from someone. Without running away from yourself anymore.
There are artists who paint what they see, others who paint what they remember or what they imagine. Our brain changes in the face of reality but, at the same time, it is capable of changing it: a "different" brain must therefore have a different relationship with reality.
In art this "process" can lead to the creation of new realities, which will only partly depend on "sensorial information"; our brain, in fact, does not necessarily need the continuous "information flow" coming from our senses. Dreams, memories that "revive" in mental images and also representations "simply" created by our mind testify to this event.
In this sense, art amplifies reality, creates a new "mental channel" capable of opening up to new experiences. The visual stimuli, real or evoked by memory, which excite the nervous system of the artist at the moment of the creation of the work of art, transformed by his hand into colors and shapes, will stimulate the nervous system of the observer. The work of art must be able to arouse in the observer's brain sensations and emotions that were present in the artist's brain. Approaching a work of art, looking at it, perceiving it, understanding it and appreciating it, implies the involvement of many brain structures and the activation of very specific mechanisms, starting from the functioning at the basis of visual perception, to those involved in the so-called "psychology of see ", in the aesthetic and emotional experience. This refers not only to the emotion felt by those who enjoy a painting but also to the creative moment that involves the artist to create his work.
Some researchers, especially psychologists and neurophysiologists, have been fascinated by the possibility of studying the properties and characteristics of the brain that are part of the evaluation of a work of art and the pleasure it can give; persuaded by the idea that the understanding of these cerebral mechanisms, together with the knowledge of the events of the life of an artist and of the culture of his time, can favor a greater "knowledge" and appreciation of the work and of those who created it.
A work of art is born from the combination of what the artist experiences "visually" and how he interprets what is communicated to him from the outside world. Both the acquisition of visual information and its internal processing can be altered by pathological causes.
The effects of serious mental illnesses, often altering the artist's perceptive and emotional abilities, can affect his pictorial expression and testify how the painter's life story becomes an integral part of his work.
All this emerges in the paintings of some great painters in particular moments of their life.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 