Vale Palmi

The research aims to present and define the tendency of the Vertical Line in contemporary and emerging art between Belgium and Italy.
The Vertical Line is the direction who leads to the Spirit in comparison with the horizontal one who takes to the materiality. In art, it represents those artists who work on spiritual, ontological and metaphysical themes and who deals with high, essential and universal problems such as Being, Consciousness, Evolution. Traveling from the profound to the elevated and back again, the Vertical Line invites reflection on the fundamental, unresolved questions that have accompanied man throughout his history: Where do I come from? Who am I? Where am I going?

Encouraging to a reflection about these questions and at the same time opposing to the Horizontal Line (that proposes an useless art, not directed to the consciousness’s evolution of human kind) the Vertical Line tries to give back to Art its role of reference, its sacrality, its link to the invisible, its “Aura”.

The characteristics of the Vertical Line are recognized in a practical way through the study of historicized contemporary artists who had the vertical inclination and through the active search for emerging contemporary artists who could be considered as vertical artists.
The research is conducted between Belgium and Italy, comparing the similarities or differences in approach between vertical artists from the North and the South.