Virgin, genuine, free places. Where the light is not a blade and does not affect the vision, where the lack can be read like an uncorrupted blackboard. It has been estimated that 83 percent of people in the world live under light-polluted skies, that 1/3 will never see the Milky Way: with Rafael Yossef Herman [Be'erSheva, 1974] darkness becomes a canvas and , at the same time, a warning for the protection of the perfect environment, a message of sustainability that flows from his artistic research over the last 15 years. Herman has developed a method that uses darkness as a source of light, using photography as a support. And that precisely for this reason, it has led to a more important attention towards light pollution: those of Herman, are conceptual works in search of absolute, stripped-down, unadulterated reality. In Italy, among the few sites where there is natural darkness there are Valle d'Aosta and the Madonie, in Sicily, not contaminated by light pollution: hope starts from here. Thus ESSE was born - in the graphic vision, a large S overturned horizontally, a letter that recalls the Island, but also the incomplete sign of the Infinite, a different look at the subject - an exhibition that opens with a midnight vernissage at 00.00 on April 22 at the Sant'Elia Foundation in Palermo where he will remain for two months, anticipating the next exhibitions in New York, Stockholm and New Delhi.

After a two-year break, Rafael Y. Herman returns with a great solo show in Palermo in the wake of his latest project, still in progress: the artist set off in search of wild, remote places, sites not polluted by light , far from inhabited centers, large or small: mountain peaks, smaller islands, the sea, virgin places, a completely new Sicily, invisible through the naked eye full of everyday images. Only in these places - which are becoming more and more unobtainable - Herman manages to find the conditions to give birth to his works.