In the contemporary imagination, the casino – or as they would say in English: the casino – it is a floating space, where calculation and destiny coexist and risk is transformed into experience. It is a mental place rather than a physical one, built on expectation, possibility and unpredictability. Art, long before its modern codification, traversed these same uncertain areas and recognized in the gesture of playing a mirror on the human condition. Of the teeming squares of Bruegel at the silent tables of Cezannethis gesture reveals the deep tensions running through society.In Children’s gamespainted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1560, recreational activity is not an escape, but structure. The square is full of bodies involved in more than eighty different actions, and yet nothing seems chaotic. Every movement seems to respond to an invisible rule, to a learned and shared choreography. Children imitate adults, anticipate roles, simulate hierarchies. Bruegel views this dimension as a form of world construction, a system in which the individual learns to be among others, to recognize boundaries, fictions and margins of freedom.
When Caravaggioa few decades later he paints I bari (1594), the space shrinks and the tone changes radically. There is no longer the community, but the relationship. Three figures, a table, an exchange of glances. The young man in the center of the scene thinks he is participating in a game, but in reality he is already a prisoner of it. His opponent draws a hidden card while his accomplice watches. The scene is therefore charged with a revealing tension: it does not show what is happening, but what is being prepared beneath the surface. Also Georges de La TourIn the Cheat with the ace of diamonds (1620)builds the picture around this precarious balance. The faces remain silent, the light is silent. Everything exists as a function of what remains to be done.
Here the playful dimension coincides with a threshold. It is not the action, but the interval that precedes it. A mental territory in which time seems to expand and reality loses its consistency. It’s the same suspension that Paul Cezanne takes it to the extreme The card players (1890). The two men sitting opposite each other reveal no emotion. There is no visible deception or triumph. The comparison takes place elsewhere, in an indoor space. Cézanne eliminates every superfluous element to focus on a fragile balance, consisting of volumes, distances and minimal relationships. The table thus becomes a mental construction, a silent form in which any outcome remains possible.
This situation does not only belong to the private sphere. In Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, Edgar Degas observe how this logic dissolves in everyday life and transforms into atmosphere. In L’Absinthe (1875)a woman and a man sit at the same table, but share nothing. Their eyes are elsewhere. The table that should unite separates. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrays similar situations in works like In the Rue des Moulins Salon (1894)where the figures seem immersed in a suspended temporality. Waiting becomes the real protagonist.
Con Marcel Duchampthis dimension definitively transforms into a method. Duchamp doesn’t just represent chess, as in Portrait of chess players (1911)but recognizes in the game a structure that can describe the functioning of art itself. Chess is a closed and perfect system, where every move opens up unexpected scenarios. The game thus becomes a thinking model, a series of decisions made under conditions of uncertainty. The attention shifts from the object to the process.
It is precisely this intuition that does that Johan Huizinga takes center stage The playing manpublished in 1938. Huizinga argues that play is not a marginal activity, but an original condition. Culture emerges from this separate dimension, consisting of rules, shared fictions and temporary spaces. Its power lies in this apparent unnecessaryness: it allows individuals to explore alternatives, build relationships, assign meaning to experiences.
Many contemporary artists have taken this awareness to extreme consequences. Yoko Onocon Play it on trust (1966), creates an all-white chessboard, in which the differences between the pieces tend to dissolve. Jeff Koons transforms playful objects into monumental presences, such as in the series of sculptures Balloon Dog (1994–2000)transferring children’s imaginations to public spaces. Marina Abramovicget into performance Rhythm 0 (1974)constructs situations in which the behavior of the spectator remains open and unpredictable.
In these experiences, the work is no longer just something to observe, but a field to cross. It exists the moment someone decides to enter it. As in any game, it is not about the result, but about the tension that precedes it, the period in which anything can happen.
This tension between freedom and destiny also runs through literature. In his novel The player, Fedor Dostoyevsky describes roulette as a device that can completely absorb those who approach it, not because of the winning itself, but because of the intensity of the experience it provides. “What is the game? It is the battle between man and fate‘, observes the main character Alexei, who recognizes an extreme form of consciousness in that suspended moment.
It is perhaps for this reason that we keep returning to those suspended spaces, physical or mental, in which the game stages the oldest confrontation: that between the human desire for control and the unpredictability of fate.
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