Claudio Edinger: Machina Mundi – Rio do Céu

Beauty is a form of Genius –is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
Oscar Wilde in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

From the Greek “aisthesis”, feeling, the aesthetics emerges in art as an analysis of the sensations complex originated in the relationship between subject and object.

Some essential questions on the topic appear with Hegel’s and Kant’s studies- discussed until today. Are aesthetic experiences subordinated to some predetermined purpose or do they constitute a logical ordering? Would aesthetics be a result of culture? Or would culture be a result of an aesthetic inclination of man?
The perspective from which Claudio Edinger sees Rio de Janeiro makes such familiar landscapes look unique, sublime. When we look at the photographs, everything around dissolves and we are led to the world of the beautiful, harmonious and divine. The view from the sky allows detaching to then realize our own littleness and the relativity of all.
Machina Mundi, or the world’s gear, seems to belong to two dynasties, the real and the unreal. The reality of the stories that are lost, hidden in a surface on which everything is irrelevant, in that inaccurate volume that seen from above disappears, but we know it exists.
The unreal of what we have never seen, the city as a model, in another prism, another time, a new language. Colors, textures, and shapes that are only possible by the eye and audacity of the photographer who brings images of the space.
Edinger guides us, leads our attention to the unexpected with a unique way of glimpsing and unveiling points of views until then untouched. Photography is less a form of mimetic transgression of the visible than a way to transgress the borders of visual, and to find in reality what our eyes do not perceive.
For more than fifteen years researching about his hometown, in Machina Mundi, Claudio Edinger exhibits aerial views that reaffirm beauty as a fundamental characteristic in the 21st-century art, and inserts his work in the pantheon naturally sculpted by great masters, who have already paid tribute to this wonderful city, such as Drummond, Tom Jobim, Marc Ferrez, Guignard, Debret, Villa Lobos, Pablo Neruda and even Orson Welles.
As Nietzsche states: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”.