Between House and Universe

“For our house is our corner of the world. As has

often been said, it is our first universe, a real

cosmos in every sense of the word.”1

In The Poetics of Space, an influential work of architectural theory published in 1958, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explores the relationships between the mind, the home, and the world. Using an approach that melds architectural analysis with poetry and philosophy, Bachelard explores childhood experiences of home, citing both his own memories and those of other authors. These recollections provide the basis for philosophical reveries that lead from particular, fundamental components of home design like corners, cellars, attics, stairs, and windows toward a broader consideration of how an individual comes to feel at home in the world, as one individual in the infinite expanse of the universe.

Analyzing the experience of looking out onto snow-covered surroundings, Bachelard writes that “as a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action. The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.”2

Luisa Adelfio is a dreamer of houses.

Luisa Adelfio: Transcendence unites four bodies of work made over the last five years: pastels on newspaper, oil paintings on linen, oil paintings on panel, and sculptures combining acrylic and glass. The earliest works, her Corona Chronicles, are pastels that originated from the international COVID lockdown period, in which so much of the world was shuttered and the intimacy of the home was intensely felt. Working from her childhood homes in Maryland and in Palermo, Sicily, Adelfio relied on newspapers to bring the world into the home, utilizing them for both inspiration and material support for her daily drawings. In these works, domestic objects serve as protagonists: chairs, telephones, place settings. Yet these objects reach outward, beyond their domestic setting, interacting with the headlines: candlesticks keep vigil, flowers memorialize, and the food mill turns endlessly, as the world does.

By contrast, Adelfio’s oil paintings are grounded in a geometric, abstract idiom of simple shapes, often repeated several times on one picture plane. Circles and rectangles recur, the former atop the latter, suggesting human forms or celestial bodies rising above the earth. In the linen paintings the backgrounds are left in reserve, allowing her marks to rest on a textured, natural-colored blankness. In the panel paintings these shapes are set against a bright white background, evoking Bachelard’s universal whiteness. This is the pure white of infinity, of heaven, of the void, of perfection. It pushes her work further into celestial territory, to the ordered movement of the planets.

Throughout the work, abstraction provides a certain facticity. These are not images of circles and rectangles, they are circles and rectangles. The gold and silver are not merely colors, but through the use of gold and silver leaf, they are the very materials from which the colors are derived (indeed, abstracted). The moment an artist turns to representation, a step is taken away from reality. The viewer is no longer presented with the medium as medium, with paint as paint, but rather the medium masquerading as something else, a re-presentation.

The sculptures complicate this picture. They are simplified renderings of homes made of clear acrylic, and at the same time they are functioning as homes. Housed within their interiors are glass orbs, planetary in their smooth solidity. The heavens have been domesticated, the universe brought indoors. Though Bachelard deals with the imagined home of memory and fantasy, he acknowledges the hostilities and difficulties of life, noting, “Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.”3

Leading from home to the heavens, Luisa Adelfio’s work in Transcendence helps us to see art’s ascendant function, that of cultivating greater attention and intensity of seeing.

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 4.2 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 40-41.4.

2 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 40-41.

3 Ibid., 46-47