Richard Long – Line of chance

Richard Long’s art develops around a quest for balance and a fusion between nature in the “first” state and man’s abstract, primordial geometrical representations. Culture and nature, in their most absolute, universal, schematic and synthetic form. The natural world with the total absence of man together with the ancestral configurations of man’s will and his capacity to communicate and to mark his own vision and his own presence of the reality on this planet, his propensity for reorganising it according to mathematical rules. A circle assembled with stones found in the desert or a line obtained by stamping on grass or snow, present and perpetuate through a universally recognisable form the innate desire to unite with nature and the innate instinct to abstract and schematize reality. Long has always taken long solry journeys on foot through landscapes, crossing deserts and meadows, forests and glaciers at all latitudes. The action of walking has allowed him to broaden the borders of the idea and the practice of sculpture which, in his work, through the potentiality of being deconstructed in space and in time, becomes concrete both around the concept of place and the concept of material and of form. In the installation for the Madre a primordial element like mud, the union of water and earth, distributed horizontally on the walls of the room imparts its archaic identity constituting, at one and the same time, the material and the message of the work.