The invisible Buddha can only be seen through the third eye of the imagination. The Buddha is in us and around us. The eyes of the Buddha see the past, the present, the future – everything that is there and everything that is not there.
Artist Salvatore Garau with the invisible Buddha
The Italian artist Salvatore Garau has taken the concept a stage further by creating an invisible Buddha that sold at the auction house Art-Rite in Italy in May for €15,000 – double the pre-sale estimate. The buyer went home with a certificate of authenticity and a set of instructions: the work must be exhibited in a private house in a 5-by-5 foot space free of obstruction.
Titled ‘Lo Sono’ (I am), Garau’s sculpture finds form in its own nothingness. He told ‘Diario AS’ in Spain. ‘The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy. Even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight. Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.’
‘Lo Sono’ follows Garau’s earlier ‘Buddha in Contemplation,’ a chimerical sculpture on display in February 2024 on a square marked by white tape on the stone path in the Piazza Della Scala in Milan. In September, he unveiled in front of the New York City stock exchange ‘Afrodite Cries’ in a painted white circle, the project backed by the Italian Cultural Institute whose officers came to admire the invisible work of art.
‘When I decide to ‘exhibit’ an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms,’ Salvatore Garau told Taylor Dafoe at Artlink.
Duchamp and the Invisible Buddha
Garau points out that just because we can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. ‘My sculptures are carved from air and spirit. “Lo Sono” is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination, a power that everyone has, even those who don’t believe they have it.’
Is the invisible Buddha a trick, a con, an artistic new form of fake news?
Cynics may come to that conclusion. But, then, what is the purpose of art? If art isn’t political, it is just pictorial. Conceptional art is designed to make people think and see things in new ways. Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal he bought at a plumbing store at the Society of Independent Artists Show in New York in 1917. Titled ‘Fountain’ and signed R. Mutt, Duchamp wasn’t telling those roaming the gallery, ‘This is Art.’ He was posing the question ‘What is Art?’
Art is created in the fourth dimension – the space beyond length, width, and depth. As Salvatore Garau explains: ‘After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?’
oOo
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The third eye is not imagination in Buddhism, but a clarity of consciousness (Ajna chakra, intuition directly linked to a profound understanding of reality beyond illusions), which precisely nullifies all those who claim to have freed themselves through the dictates of their ego. Welcome to the perverted world of contemporary and international vomitive art. Salvatore Garau and Marcel Duchamp are both fools, and their former, present, and future fellow travelers are sub-fools, trying to make fullness out of emptiness by clapping their hands like crazy sea lions.
Salvatore Garau is brilliant but in which way I am yet to decide
Brilliant.