The human vocation for doubt is a critical predisposition to confronting the challenges of existence by rejecting any form of passive acceptance of the “given”. Rather, it entails “breaking through” the walls of one’s habitual “comfort zone” in order to think outside the box. Those who succeed in fulfilling this task discover an original path “outside the box” – original not merely in its innovative form, but also as a primordial return to their own concealed Origin.

This existential journey finds an emblematic expression in Vana’s Metatheist work. In this piece, the artist depicts a museum of his own works, which, multiplied through iterations and variations, generate a sense of wonder, heightened by the appearance, before the gaze of the doubting and contemplative subject, of the sublime seascape of Positano, the artist’s birthplace.

The device employed is that of mise en abyme: each frame hanging on the walls does not enclose an image but rather opens it up, revealing within itself another threshold, another figure, another corridor. The frame – the most literal embodiment of containment – paradoxically becomes a place of openness. This is the conceptual core of the work, a celebration of recursion as both an aesthetic and existential theme. In this canvas, recursion is further enriched by the emphasis placed on the natural horizon and its complex relationship with contemporary technology.

Deep blues and warm oranges maintain a complementary tension throughout the palette, tracing the polarity between rationality and emotion, distance and intimacy. The figure at the centre of the canvas stands precisely at the point of equilibrium between the two portals: he does not choose between them, but inhabits the divide. In the etymological sense, he is the one who “ex-sists”, who ventures beyond the boundaries of the visible.

Of particular significance in this regard is the technique developed through the use of AI, with which Vana interacts in creating his Meta-Museum and in exploring the pull of the Elsewhere towards which his gaze is directed in the painting. Generative AI serves as an interlocutor: a true extension of the artist’s creative thought. Trained on Vanacore’s style, AI becomes a fully-fledged virtual artist’s studio, within which a layered creative process takes shape.

In this work, further refined using digital tools, printed onto a physical support and then manually altered by the artist using tempera and water-based paints, the digital and the analogue, the algorithmic and the human, are brought together in a synthesis designed to touch the viewer’s soul – what the artist calls the “Turing Test of Art”.

Luca Siniscalco