Le Ere

The ages — a meditation on time, drawn in pencil and exhibited in Strasbourg.

Le Ere is a studio work by artist Neve, pencils on black cardboard, 70 × 100 cm, created in 2011 and exhibited at the Fiera Internazionale di Arte Contemporanea 2012, Strasbourg.

"Le Ere" (The Ages) is a drawing in coloured pencils on black cardboard, 70×100 cm, made in 2011. The work was exhibited at the Fiera Internazionale di Arte Contemporanea 2012 in Strasbourg. The subject is an elderly man portrayed in three-quarter view on a deep black ground: a worn face, heavy glasses, a brown knitted wool beanie pushed slightly back on the head. The rendering is in coloured pencil — the warmth of the flesh tones, the precise texture of the knitted hat, the reflections on the metal frames of the glasses — hyperrealist from within the intimacy of close observation. The figure is rendered with affection and without idealisation: this is old age looked at directly. Floating in the dark space around the man are three categories of object: autumn leaves — large red-brown maple leaves, dry and curling at the edges, the colour of late October — water droplets, hovering as if caught mid-fall; and at the lower centre, a helical or spiral object, black-and-white striped, containing within its coils a small green form — a chrysalis, a pupa, something in the process of transformation. The structure of the image is the structure of the title: the ages, the eras. Autumn is the age of the leaves — their end, their beauty at the end. The old man is the age of the human — the same season, the same position in the cycle. And the chrysalis inside the helix is the age that follows: the transformation that old age prepares. What looks like an ending is the preparation of a beginning; what looks like decay is metamorphosis in process. The work's stated theme — "la dicotomia vita-morte è colta nell'attimo in cui la vecchiaia si prepara ad una nuova nascita" (the life-death dichotomy is caught in the moment when old age prepares a new birth) — names precisely this: not the end, not the beginning, but the threshold between them. The moment of maximum age is the moment of maximum potential for renewal.