Tzimtzum

In the Hebrew Kabbalah, tzimtzum is what makes God’s creation of the world possible. Its meaning corresponds to the act of retreating, like the wave that retreats to cover the sand in the following motion, and indicates the act by which God retreats into himself to “make room” for what he wants to create.

The entire work of Paolo Facchinetti plays on this, on the composed and silent dialectic, pursued as research in continuous tension between the material and the idea. Looking at his works there emerges a rarefaction and a contraction such as not to make the weight and the fatigue of a material lump surface to thought.

Landscapes of the soul, obtained by removing, recognizable because crossed by light. It is precisely in stripping the work of its colours that light becomes truly visible thanks to the tzimtzum: it arrives by removing matter and spreads by making the void.

Thus, this work speaks of something through its absence: of light through shadows, of colour through monochrome, of what is earthly through an immaterial language, of infinite space through the two-dimensionality of the surface; it becomes a door, an ambiguous element, which can open or close, become a passage or a barrier, without ever giving up being an invitation.