Arcanum
tarot cards, presenting twenty-two images which are “constructed” on a musical staff and made up of corresponding chords of three notes each, which can be listened to online in succession.
Continuing my work with alphabets and numbers, here I explore the arcane code of the tarot, transforming visual details into fundamental structures that are scaled up to fill the entire staff paper, sometimes producing Escher-like figures. For the composition, I drew inspiration not only from the divinatory art of tarot, but also from Aleksandr Nikolayevich Scriabin and his “mystic” chord: a succession of notes conceived by the Russian composer and pianist both as a harmonic foundation and as a key to reading the Divine in the symphonic poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire. By sampling the wind, the quintessential invisible element, I synthesized a digital instrument similar to an organ with which I performed the soundtrack.
(Alessio de Girolamo)
Curated by Daniele Perra.
Text by Federico Pazzagli for Exibart magazine.