Etheric

This work is a geometric mandala inspired by the enigmatic Roman dodecahedron, a small bronze object found throughout the Roman Empire and whose function has not yet been recognized. I am fascinated by this sort of "backward" journey into the future if we think that only recently have scientists discovered that some of the main elements on Earth, in their atomic structure, have geometric shapes that can be traced back to the Platonic solids, and in their vertices are the protons (which we could represent as spheres). Did they already know something that we only recently discovered? Plato, more than 2300 years ago, in his famous script Timeo, associated the main elements (earth, fire, air and water) with 5 solids respectively: cube, tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron. At the dodecahedron he had instead associated with what Aristotle called the fifth element, the ether, or quintessence, or the substance used by the Creator to draw the entire Universe, defined by the alchemists as the main compound of the philosopher's stone. Plato writes of the dodecahedron that is the figure that represents "the symbolic image of the soul" itself. All this has inspired my "Etheric", within which we can also recognize the symbols of the planets, to represent the Universe, as a movement without solution of continuity that goes from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

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