The recent passing of Luísa Cunha at the age of 77 invites reflection on what she gave to the world. She led a thoroughly artistic life, each era and direction forming part of a now‑complete narrative. Her first taste of public recognition came in the early 1990s, while completing a degree in sculpture, a discipline she would later teach, nurturing a lifelong love for material form. 
 
Born in 1949, among the Baby Boom generation, Luísa Cunha developed a fascination with language, how we perceive it and how we use it. This curiosity shaped much of her work. Space, sound, and form became philosophical instruments through which she explored meaning beyond the educated or habitual idea. 
 
One of her most memorable pieces, Do What You Have to Do, featured two suspended speakers repeating the phrase in slightly different tones and rhythms. The experience of standing in that space, hearing the voices until their meaning dissolved into abstraction, invited eccentric and liberating thought. 
 
Cunha’s art often blurred the line between authority and resistance. By loosening our mechanised connection to something as commanding as language, she allowed visitors to feel detached from systems they once obeyed instinctively. Her work reminds us that frameworks and hierarchies exist only through shared compliance. 
 
Known for saying her art was about observation rather than invention, Luísa Cunha offered a way to test the boundaries of conformity and discover which are worth maintaining. By letting others perceive the subtle realities that had dawned on her, she expanded human vision to include the quiet entropy of dogma, a space where perception itself becomes art. 
 
 Via ArtNet
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​How many times do we appreciate the way something feels? Maybe when we are trying on new clothes or testing the texture of our cooking, we rarely spend longer than a few moments exploring this facet of reality. Sight is a dominant sense for most people, it over lays the others in a primary manner. What we hear, smell, feel, and taste are usually subordinate unless we are deliberately using the other senses. For blind people, touch is a lifeline for the receiving of passive information. Braille is an ingenious way of writing via texture shapes that, with practice, people can learn to read like script. The level of resolution required to determine the shapes of each letter is higher that what most people are used to. Imagine what experiences we are missing out on because our fingers are out of focus?
 
Multi-disciplinary artist Fulvio Morella has invented a method of putting this faculty of human interaction to work. Known for producing geometry and angular shapes in nearly everything he does, this latest exhibition is no different. Only this time, the idea is that you have to handle the work and explore it via the sense of touch. Of course, the works look fantastic without the blindfold but when you take the plunge and explore the series through the fingertips, a whole new artistic experience is opened.
 
With the work, Morella wants to rework the idea that sight is what gives us knowledge of the world. A hidden landscape of subtle and fine surface characters is hiding in plain sight. We must close our eyes and let the fingers do the work. Beginning with woodturning in 2019, the artist began experimenting with Greek Braille inscriptions on mixed media creations. Since then, he’s taken the concept to an ever-increasing reach of media that has various identifiable touch qualities. The set, the grain, the nap, and finish all stand as portraits for inner thoughts and abstract conceptual understanding.
 
Currently on display in Rome until 31st of May.

Via World Art News