Art by Numbers

The number, object and subject of paintings, sculptures, drawings, video, films, photographs and installations have revealed an aesthetic potential that had remained latent and unexpressed up until the first decades of the last century. For a long time, the number in figurative arts was only the result of a transitive counting, an answer to the question “How many?” Virtues, planets, apostles, ranks of angels, seasons, star signs, senses have been reproduced, personified, represented according to their number, in a correlation often tight enough to transcend into cliche (Rigon 2006).