(…) For his solo exhibition at the Claudio Bottello Contemporary gallery in Torino, the artist found inspiration in Nietzsche’s stay in the piemontese capital. The famous sentence taken from The Gay Science, prophecizing the death of God, is fundamental in the installation which occupies, like a leitmotiv, the whole space of the gallery. One should make it clear from the start that the artist’s point of view, from which he decided to tackle the complex issue of the title, has little to do with the active or passive nihilistic implications as regards the final nature of such a statement, preferring instead to inscribe itself already in the seminal consequences that such a declaration leads to for ‘the symbolic’. In a way, the discursive and iconic variations that Dombis is offering to us are potential evidence that we can free ourselves from and even be freed by, the symbolic, so much at work in the contemporary world, where the fable narrated by the Röcken-based thinker finally finds a stable ontological value in this age marked by the supremacy of images. His research, including his own peculiar epistemological approach, is anything but ingenuous. It can indeed be linked to instances of hermeneutic enlightening concerning certain forms of knowledge in which the aesthetic and scientific components tend to fuse on the ground of their common references to images. (…)

Extract from  Pascal Dombis’ s Gott ist Tot by GianCarlo Pagliasso / More >