Fragilitàby Alberto Salvadori and Luigi Fassi

In the language of contemporary communication, fragility is considered as negative condition of inferiority, defect of origin to be corrected under penalty of social marginalization and the condemnation of uselessness. However, it is a common feeling, supported by the reflections of art in all its forms and by the research of medicine of psychology, as in fragility values of sensitivity and delicacy, of dignity are hidden and kindness. A primary quality of frailty is its ability to foster understanding of the other, opening up to the dimension of care and community, to the intuition of the unsayable and the invisible that accompany us in life.

The dialogical confrontation between wild nature and an inhabitant of any place on earth is resolves in a clear-cut response of nature: the latter's intentions are never addressed to the happiness or unhappiness of men, but they are completely indifferent to their fate. What appears to man as offense or benefit of the elements, it is actually the free course of nature that it runs parallel to human life but without taking care of it. The essential fragility of life human is thus also delivered to the indifference of nature, even in the search for one empathic closeness to it.

Fragility is a constantly unstable balance but also something that exists as essential datum inherent in every moment of the human condition. Here then is the fragility is also a state of grace, as an element of formation and growth through experiences in every age of life, and a founding condition for the adventure of experiences interpersonal.

Fragility is intertwined with the awareness of the vulnerability of human nature, in which everyone is a person inasmuch as they are open to a relational dimension, made up of words, gestures of listening and welcoming others.

The relationship between man and nature is enriched in the images and words created by individuals to tell their experience in the world. The images created and transmitted from man, like words, they too substantiate their strength in fragility; they can be immersed in the dusty immanence of the present or open to the hope of time to come, permeable to encounter. Words, essentially fragile like pictures, they are actually very powerful because they are bearers of unexpected and transcendent, luminous and dark. To listen you have to be silent, to see you have to listen. Not everything is sayable, not everything is expressible; the silence of a painting thus allows us to listen without delude ourselves that we can explain the thoughts and emotions we feel in front of it. The silence and the word, which for its fragility is silent, can prove to be more powerful, stronger and more resistant of who speaks.

Avoiding useless words in order to search for the necessary ones requires the space of silence and the search for another element - joy - suspended between fragility and absolute. Joy does not live either of the past or the future, but it is a moment of wonderful growth of the present, radically different from happiness. In front of a work of art, one feels joy or pain. There joy in its extreme condition of fragility has an absolute power since contrary to happiness it has no opposite, it is the symmetry of a very pure emotion and friable that comes only from something interior, like the experience of art.

Art is like friendship, it carries within itself the meaning of an infinite dialogue; when you see a work that arouses joy in us, it eliminates silence and removes the weight of absence proven up to that point. Art thus ignites the intuition of unity between the world and being human, re-sending to a clear and simple future, not a portion of what exists, but something much larger. In it resonates and becomes perceptible what lies beyond the object and time represented: the totality of existence.