In the beginning there was light. But also water and fire, wax and lead smoothed by time and weather events. In the work of the Neapolitan artist (born in 1953), the archaic energy of the elements dialogues with classical iconographies, with themes of the sacred and the invisible. For the MAN of Nuoro, Gregorio Botta is studying an original project that, starting from his research on balance and silence, distills abstract presences in space, plays of reflections and transparencies in matter, pure geometries and drops of rain, streams of water and staves dotted with minimal forms.

The title of the exhibition "Silence is so accurate", inspired by a phrase by Mark Rothko, embraces a path in which the precision of the design sketches near horizons, marks time in the circuits and gears of small celibate machines, as Duchamp would have defined them; absurd machines, devoid of a specific functionality, but poetic in their orchestrating movements in the void, producing sounds, vapors or free graphies in space.

Iron and glass, alabaster and dried flowers, combined together produce intimate landscapes, chamber architectures, references to daily iconographies, objects, symbols, allegories of an existence sewn on waxed paper, which consumes, wears out and transfigures in waiting. Epiphanies and disappearances, imperceptible secrets and revelations betray Botta's vocation for "an art of subtraction, of little, of less, hoping to arrive at an art of nothing. An art that disappears and leaves only, like a vibration, like a secret engine, the action for which it was born".

The imprint is a trace of a legacy in the Pompeii series. The weight of smoke is the survival of matter in the work that gives the title to the exhibition. And then the melted wax in archetypal forms evokes Morandian geometries on a crystal plane that stretches infinitely in the cycle of Horizons, where the eternal theme of the threshold carries with it the long literature of the boundary between the visible and the invisible, between contingency and immaterial.