The Fourth Kind of Madness

“Where to? And from where?” is asked in the first line of one of the early extant works on the meaning of Beauty as the city walls are crossed to enter the countryside and enquire into the irrational. Only by cultivating the highest form of madness—Love—starting from a fragment of beauty in the world in its infinite becoming we could have learned to perceive intelligible beauty. Losing reverence for beauty would have resulted in losing our capacity to seek it in human pursuits, laws and ideals. Ultimately, beauty would have turned into something to be merely consumed. Inspired by the postmodern shunning of beauty, “The Fourth Kind of Madness“ elaborates on Elaine Scarry’s philosophical work on the relationship between beauty and justice, and the societal value of the “unselfing” that we undergo when standing in the presence of something beautiful, what philosopher Simone Weil saw as a radical decentering—possibly the only perceptual event in human experience where loss of perceived or pursued centrality is associated with the feeling of pleasure. In the series I reconsider beauty as a subject, reevaluating it from an alternative perspective that goes beyond counter-aesthetic frameworks of political and social engagement, and explore how our pursuit of notions of justice, equality and fairness is assisted by beauty and its availability to sensory perception. Seven years in the making, “The Fourth Kind of Madness“ reflects on the societal value of the encounter with something beautiful. Where to? And from where? Installation details: The photographs are imagined as cuts into the surface of the world, small openings along the dividing line between the sensuous and the intelligible. When the series is articulated on the vertical axis, the visual metaphor of the line opening a gap in-between the walls of the exhibiting space morphs into the “scala amoris”—Diotima’s ladder of love—moving us, one step at a time, from appreciating beauty across the surface of the world to seeking it in the very ethical framework of society.