Luigi Pirandello Quotes

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her.