Aldo Spinelli

Italia • Italy

Ever since antiquity, mythology and history have been fascinated by the theme of the labyrinth. The myth of Daedalus and the Labyrinth he created for King Minos of Crete; religious traces in Gothic cathedrals where it was impossible to get lost in the “Paths of Jerusalem” as there was only one way to reach the centre, because there is only one initiatory life, but sufficient to arrive at the centre of our being, to find equilibrium and give a meaning to our existence.

There are many labyrinthine forms, linear or branched, with centrifugal and centripetal routes, unicursal or multicursal patterns... each path is not an end unto itself, it is not a banal disentanglement of branches and crossroads, but a real search for oneself; it does not matter how long we take to walk through it, so much as the physical effort that we devote to it, the only true objective is to follow a path of growth, of choice, of understanding the opportunities we want to grasp in order to understand who we really are and where we want to take our Ego.

In 1972, Spinelli dedicated his Art to this initiatory path, circumscribing the letters of the word Labyrinth to create a new shape, like finding the true key to the reading of this myth; as though the labyrinth were searching for itself, even before letting anyone else enter it. Spinelli adopts this concept and dedicates it to the human race, but also to every single individual... because the life of each one of us, if viewed from above, is, deep down, nothing more than a strictly personal initiatory path, to the extent that each individual has his or her “own” labyrinth, artistically synthesised by circumscribing the letters of our name, because we each have our destiny; the difference lies in having the courage to make choices, sometimes to go back and start again with greater awareness, until we focus on our life and discover our essence.

Modern technology would describe the Labyrinth created using our name and surname as a QR code that virtually leads the spectator to the biography of the “synthesised” subject... but the difference is that there is no App able to read our life a priori and tell us the best route to take...

Serena Mormino, Curator