beyond light

These are images of silence. In some of them we seem to hear the sound of night in the countryside. Darkness is peace, a pause, but it can create fear. We are used to having everything under control, and darkness with its apparently generated blindness frightens us.
What is there in the dark? To be banal: the same that there is when it is light. But we create a kind of suspended state that stimulates our imagination. When we are denied a complete understanding of what faces us, and when something at last becomes clear to our eyes, amazement and a sense of the marvellous ensue. The marvel of discovery. A gift. The silence we perceive is sacred in the widest sense of the term and has nothing to do with an uncritical, religious dimension but, rather, with a universal kind of spirituality.
Paolo Parma loves the dark, which is not necessarily the night so much as a lack of light, and has often found himself in it. In the dark everything has completely different characteristics. In his works we are guided by lights, more or less tiny reference points, which do not always make up forms. We are led to imagine and complete
what is only hinted at, to regain a childlike sense of wonder in the face of what we are shown. At first glance man might seem to be a marginal presence in all this. But this is not so. Man is present, absolutely. In all the work by Parma, an engineer involved for many years now with research through the language of images, man is in fact the protagonist. His are never narratives: we find ourselves, if anything, in front of the wish to dive into the depths, to go in search of the sense of existence in a new humanistic dimension, one in which man, the thinking being par excellence, is at times able to be carried away by. “When humanity finds itself in a setting where it loses its apparent control of things, in some way its best part emerges”, the artist has said. […]