The installation that gives the exhibition its title is made of many sheets containing many stars drawn in pencil. These stars, however, are not the work of the artist, but of his “assistant.” This is quite normal in contemporary art, in which the value of manual skill has been gradually thinning out compared to the value attributed to the idea, to the mental conception of the work. But not normal is the fact that the assistant who made by hand the drawings you see is the artist’s grandmother, and is three times her age.

This simple news completely changes the way we look at these drawings-just as it changes our standard of judgment when we look at a child’s doodle and condescendingly say that “it’s beautiful.” But, exactly what changes in our gaze? That is, what do we expect from a drawing made by a person who has reached an age approaching a century?

Indeed, if one takes a close look at these minimal constellations of stars, as well as at the drawings made earlier – reproductions of masterpieces of art or of insects, fish, birds – it cannot escape one’s notice that although they do not meet the classical representative canons, neither can they be reduced to naïve works, with all the “childish” halo that such a term drags along. Or rather, although an almost puerile uncertainty is perceived in these drawings, it is as if this element were taken into account from the furthest point, as if it had suddenly also aged-as if it had passed, in a single moment, through that artistic awareness that Picasso summarized in his famous phrase “It took me my whole life to learn to draw like a child.”

Thus, we literally cannot even understand what we are looking at anymore. At first glance, the signs we are looking at appear to us as stars – but could they not instead be asterisks, or perhaps crosses, or the innumerable spines of an endless barbed wire stretched out as protection against the distressing whiteness of the paper? And again: why do signs that at first arrange themselves in fairly regular shapes, slowly but surely begin to shift, to break into rows and columns, to dance across the sheet, to build unheard-of configurations, to disarrange themselves, and perhaps then to resume a rhythmic pattern and regain a semblance of normality, only to plunge again into chaos, and so on?

Strange as it may seem, since they are simple rods executed in pencil, these signs seem to want to preserve, like hieroglyphics, their jealous secret, and remain stubbornly impenetrable like prehistoric graffiti-they express something radically foreign which, however, precisely because they take on the appearance of an expression, because they clearly flaunt a “will to meaning,” are also tremendously close, indeed they are as if “marked within us,” inscribed in our own path of meaning.

What we look at thus retains, multiplied, all of its inexplicable ambiguity: on the one hand, we do not understand how much the awareness that it was made by such an old person affects our perception of the drawing; on the other hand, this same awareness inevitably pushes us to always seek further interpretations of what we see, which we nevertheless always feel to be illicit, abusive, ultimately vain.
What if the opacity of the enigma lies fundamentally in the blind spot from which we strive to look at these signs-from the fact that we bind them to an unambiguous and narrow idea of Time?

In fact, it must be admitted that philosophers have not devoted sufficient attention to the profound, metaphysical meaning of old age, relegating its reflection to consolatory commentaries, as in the case of ancient and medieval treatises, such as Cicero’s De senectute, evoked in a recent pamphlet by Norberto Bobbio. However, as Gilles Deleuze recalled, there also existed post-classical thinkers, arriving after Platonic-Aristotelian normalization, who developed radically subversive conceptions of the idea of time. The ancient Stoics in particular opposed to the classical three temporal dimensions past-present-future another time, a time of the instant and of the event, always impregnable because it is always split between past and future, always already-state and always to-come, always too-late and always in-anticipation. The name for classical time is Krònos, the time of the calendar and clocks, time that can be divided into parts, chronological and chronic, time marked, precisely, by the chronometer. But – and herein lies the genius of Stoicism – this time is not all time. Opposed to it is another kind of temporality, the Aiòn: the incalculable time, whose flowing is perpetually either too slow or too fast for the lives of men – the time of geological slowness or that of the infinitesimal instant in which everything changes, the Latin Aetas, the medieval Aevum or that of the éras that are lost in the abysses of the universe…

The twofold enigma guarded by these graphite constellations lies perhaps in this: on the one hand we would like to try to grasp their meaning by tracing their formal labyrinth starting from the fact that they are the work of a chronologically elderly person – on the other hand this very search yields nothing, rather it presents us again and again with our gaze that has become enigmatic itself, an interpretive opacity that backfires on us.
However, the failed interpretation, which itself becomes the enigma, also conceals its own solution. As long as we continue to think about the chronological condition of those who made these drawings, we remain chained to only one of the faces of Time-we remain in Krònos and forget the Aiòn, the other elusive face by definition, the inherently ambiguous character of the “moment” in which we perceive them, and the fact that they boldly dodge any reduction to an already-done or already-said, or a to-be-doing or to-be-doing.

Time, one would say, does nothing but “mark”: it marks faces as well as consciences, artists’ sheets as well as the deserts of the world; time, it is known, we know it only by its signs; what it is in itself, no one can say. Yes, it is true, no one can say it — but perhaps someone can (di)mark it; perhaps, escaping the “signs of time” is possible, provided we “mark time,” mark it and make it an object of meaning, radically ambiguous but present, còlto on the fact, put before us.
So the artist did well to delegate this task to the elderly “great mother,” with a complicity perhaps only possible between women. This allowed her to “skip time” and give us an instant-this one-in which what you see ceases to be mere drawings and becomes, to quote Gilles Deleuze again, “a bit of time in its pure state.”