Joseph Kosuth

1945, Toledo (Ohio), United States

Joseph Kosuth is among the founders of Conceptual Art, a movement that from the 1960s onward revolutionised the role of the artwork, shifting attention from making to thinking. Trained between New York and Europe, his artistic practice unfolds through texts, neon, objects and definitions that question perception, language and the very reality of art.
Deeply influenced by philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Adorno), Kosuth explores the ambiguity of language, placing art in direct dialogue with semantics, logic and ontology. His works do not merely aim to "show" something, but to make thought visible. Over the years he has exhibited in the world's leading museums, always maintaining strong formal and conceptual consistency. In Italy he has enjoyed a privileged dialogue with the intellectual and artistic context, and his works are today considered milestones of contemporary art.

In W.f.t. #1c [white], Kosuth draws a linguistic diagram with light: five words - lumen, light, opening, luminous, illuminate - arranged in space as a conceptual system, connected by physical neon lines that become visible threads of thought.
The work is based on one of his most emblematic practices: breaking words down to their etymological origin and meaning to reveal their semantic construction. In this case, everything revolves around the concept of "lumen", the Latin root of light, from which the terms "illuminate", "luminous" and even "opening" derive. But it is precisely this "opening" that suggests a passage between darkness and knowledge, between ignorance and revelation.

The neon light, far from being mere aesthetic form, is an integral part of the meaning: light does not represent, it is - and so too the words here do not describe light, they are light. In this way Kosuth turns language into a tangible form, a rational epiphany that illuminates the relationship between word, form and meaning.
This work is an act of visual thought, a map of the mind made object. And at Cervino 28, this piece integrates perfectly into a space that celebrates art as a dialogue between language and matter, between history and the present.