Luminous Dynamic Sculptures DI.DI.AU. (dynamic self-illuminating devices.)

Art as movement or movement in art. Some sectors of contemporary art have based their aesthetic theories on movement, assuming it works as both a real and virtual event. Movement is, on the whole, a change or process of any set of elements. Plato, for example, distinguished between two kinds of movements: alteration and translation, while Aristotle added to these substantial and quantitative movement (increase and decrease). Contemporary art, for its part, has not remained aloof from this phenomenon and has spawned a recent history of images of movement. Already in the Realist Manifesto of the '20s, Gabo and Pevsner used the term "kinetic rhythms" for the first time. Gabo gave a concrete example, exhibiting a steel rod driven by a motor, that would be called a "kinetic sculpture". Around 1955, the Denise Rene Gallery, the most important for the avant-garde, promoted the movement theorized by the Hungarian painter Victor Vasarely, who had long been interested in this type of art, as a continuation of the theories expressed by the Bauhaus. Thus, the Denise Rene Gallery organized an exhibition entitled accordingly "The Movement", articulating it in three main sections: a historical part with mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp, one with paintings by Vasarely on double-layered glass, and a third with the works of four young artists. Other artists became interested later in kinetic art, forming independent research groups parallel to Programmed Art and Gestalt, founded on the psychology of form and the mechanisms of visual perception. The Gruppo N of Padua, the Gruppo T of Milan, the Gruppo Uno of Rome, the Zero Group of Dusseldorf, Equipe 57 in Spain, the Recherche d'Art visuel group in Paris. This brief historical note is necessary for an understanding of an important field of contemporary art which is not sufficiently known and understood, and is also useful to better comprehend the work of Angelo Paparcuri and the motivations, not only the aesthetic ones, which inspire it. The movement or kinetic data that concerns Paparcuri is based primarily on light, free or incorporated into simple and efficient mechanical devices that enable light sources and their emanations to be followed with equally dynamic visual energy, in order to be able to take in also the subtle irony of the works, including the titles, thereby stimulating the imagination of the observer and his moods. ("Wind torture for half-men", for example, or "The ball chair"). Thus, these dynamic self-illuminating devices, the halogen lamps with a 12-volt electric circuit, electronic circuits and flashing lights, offer an extraordinary linguistic context, whose kinetic-luminous aspect created and realized by Angelo Paparcuri is not an echo of the past, but an original manifestation of kinetic research that characterizes many areas of present-day life.

Francesco Carbone