Currently available within the Annexe of the Limoncello gallery – for a while longer, at least, given it opened at the start of November – is an intriguing exhibition of images by Guille (Antoronta) entitled Unseen Beauty.
Guille appears to be a relatively recent arrival in Second Life – as inferred by his Profile. An educator by profession and hailing from Spain, he appears to be bound to the natural beauty of Nature, noting in his Profile that it is the ultimate expression of art whilst his Flickr stream takes us on a journey into the microscopic – as is the case with Unseen Beauty.
Through both the exhibition and his Flickr stream, Guille takes us on a rarely-seen journey, one to a world that exists not beyond our own, but within it. no, not a world – an entire universe where the strangest and in many respects the more wonderous forms of life exist.
It is possible that this is the first time that a sample of these characteristics has been exhibited in SL, as in RL this type of exhibition is extraordinarily scarce, as well as the knowledge of these wonderful and fascinating living beings to whom it is dedicated. All the images have been taken under the microscope, on living organisms that, after being observed, have been returned to the place from which they were collected. Almost all of them are very little known, and some of the smallest, contain the keys to know how we are and how we have evolved.
– Guille, describing Unseen Beauty
Thus we are presented with a series of living images of the most incredible creatures, from cyanobacteria (aka Cyanophyta or “blue-green algae”), a kind of prokaryote and one of the first organisms known to have produced oxygen, thus helping to start life on Earth as we know it today. Then there are diatoms such as the family of Coscinodiscaceae, noted for their radial symmetry and circular shapes when viewed from the front.
Each image is accompanied by an information giver providing a description of the featured algae, bacteria or amoebic form, each beautifully – in places poetically – written by Guille. Witness:
In each drop, the world of Cosmarium becomes rainbow, letting the sun melt on its cover, while absorbing the juice of life between its rays, tiny pearls that live are arcoris, true water jewels. They gravitate in the water like planets that in each drop for them is infinite.
Perhaps because it has the skin of an elephant, Cosmarium pachydermum, it endures the icy winter nights with the starry sky and the scorching summer sun on the highest peaks, as long as a drop of water is its ocean between Sphagnum, and in it, which is its universe, can show its soul scalloped with green jewel, perhaps from the times when the ice was the mantle of these mountains.
– Guille, describing Cosmarium pachydermun
Beautiful images of life unimagined – but without which we would not be here to admire it – captured in an instant and written into the memory through colour and words, Unseen Beauty is a bewitching exhibition, not to be missed, and an excellent gateway to the additional exhibitions on the remaining levels of the Annexe.
SLurl Details
- Limoncello Art Gallery Annexe: Unseen Beauty (Nanga, rated General)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 