Gorgias 2122 diptych

gorgias 21

Piece description from the artist

Gorgias (483 – 375 BCE) was an ancient Greek sophist, a pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist" although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.

Gorgias is the author of a lost work: On Nature or the Non-Existent (also On Non-Existence). Rather than being one of his rhetorical works, it presented a theory of being that at the same time refuted and parodied the Eleatic thesis. The original text was lost and today there remain just two paraphrases of it. The first is preserved by the philosopher Sextus Empiricus in Against the Professors and the other by the anonymous author of On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias. Each work, however, excludes material that is discussed in the other, which suggests that each version may represent intermediary sources (Consigny 4). It is clear, however, that the work developed a skeptical argument, which has been extracted from the sources and translated as below:

Nothing exists; Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.

Other works by Zalo Kappa

About Zalo Kappa

Madrid, Spain

Madrid based artist Nuno Paixão was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1985.
After completing his degree in Fine Arts – Painting, and starting to exhibit in 2008, Nuno departure to Leipzig, Germany to pursue further specialization in painting history and techniques, with great interest in the "european masters". Returned to Lisbon to complete a Master´s degree in Painting in 2017.
Now living and working in Madrid, Nuno´s work explores the space between abstraction and figurative, between history and the quotidian reality to create an excuse to paint and let the material transform into matter.

In an age of technological innovation, when the competitive flux of production
has taken the place of the physical expression of one's inner universe and imaginary,
and after it's obituary has been declared innumerous times over the last 150 years,
painting presents itself as an act of resistance. A melancholic resistance that mirrors
several times and spaces, between past and present, yet mostly, the extent of an utopian
time and space: the inner time and space of its author.
What room is there in the world for mystery? What language is there for a logic
and wisdom that is not binary? Can we go beyond the argument? What other
relationship can you have with the world besides dominance? Listening to the truth of
being is the silent response to a being's calling. This silent response is found in painting.

See Zalo's portfolio here
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