“I deal with light regarding the human condition; therefore, the information of his future and the relationship of technology blending into the evolution of life itself.” - Filippo Sciascia

Filippo Sciascia’s mixed media works Phylogenetic (2019) and Primitive Learning (2021) both incorporate LED light as a metaphor for knowledge and energy. Returning to the early beginnings of human civilisation and evolution, Light is underscored here as driving force of mankind’s development through the ages. From telling time to manifesting solar power in modern technology, and the digital screens that have become ubiquitous to our daily lives, light is omnipresent. These works thus refect on the formation of knowledge from ancient and biological processes, with light being a core element universal to the human experience. In place of the painterly representation of light, Sciascia demonstrates the actual phenomenon instead, irradiating his foliage with LED. While they capture a fragment of ‘artificial’ light, they point towards underlying processes in nature and phylogenetics (the study of evolutionary relationships) that are dependent on or shaped by it. But these paintings have little to do with neon art; rather, they are tied towards the tensions between representation and reality. Further refecting the artist’s interest in semiology, Primitive Learning features a lighted branch resembling arrows, a motif prevalent in European heraldry. Sciascia continuously seeks novel ways of expression in his multidisciplinary practice, resisting the schema of art history to be confned to a singular movement. His works draw on a wide range of infuences from Joseph Beuys to Egyptian art, physics theories by Richard Feynman to architecture in Bali, generating synergies between his works that demand a keen observer to uncover the semiotics within and across them.