Alchemy - a working method, a structure of thought, a personal choice to treat each step as an essential stage in a great process of becoming. Not just a transformation, but a reduction to the essential and from there a little further towards perfection. This Ars Magna has inspired and informed, created strong connections with art and artists, always occupying the dark, even marginal place, content to remain, fundamentally, an obsession with the way matter allows itself to be forced, melted or reconfigured. Just as alchemists operated for centuries trying to reshape the natural world, redefining the primordial elements, artistic processes evoke inner transformation through experiments on form, light, color, human and more than human bodies. 

​

The fascination with mystical and esoteric themes, the eternal search for the philosopher's stone, the legendary substance believed to be able to turn any metal into gold and offer eternal life, have been and are speculated by artists. In the rooms of Vila Catena, their works evoke alchemical processes, from which a common desire to understand, transform and subject the matter specific to their practice reverberates. 

​

The exhibition brings together over twenty modern and contemporary voices that complement each other through painting, sculpture, installation, ceramics, photography or object. Thus, gold is transformed into a material of resilience through the work of Sultana Maitec, light takes on oxymoronic dimensions in the imagination of Victor Brauner. The elixir of life is pharmaceutical re-semantized through the interventions of Daniel Spoerri and COADY, and then scattered in the myths of folk medicine that bear the patina of medieval miniatures in the paintings of Martina Vacheva. Updating the motif of the Vitruvian man, the contemporary body is brought back to the center of the exchanges between science, art and alchemy, through the Anthropocosmos series by Paul Neagu or, downright fluid, a permeable membrane between genres and gestures as in the practice of Hortensia Mi Kafchin.

 

Beyond the occult imaginary, alchemy is constructed in the homonymous exhibition in the form of a direct invitation to enter the archaic liminal space that fuels and guides popular beliefs.