When I think of how drastically my existence has changed from March 2020 to today, I feel dizzy. A whirl of thoughts begins to close in on me and I can never make out its overall shape: it is an intricate, tangled web of emotional states, memories, traumas and everything that has made up my lived experience from that moment until now. I imagine I am not the only one this happens to.

I am 27 years old and, like many of my generation, I no longer understand a thing. Not that I understood all that much before the Covid-19 pandemic, mind you, but at least I had the illusion of having finally settled into this thing we call humanity.

You know that moment when, in the middle of lockdown, many people tried to lift our spirits by pointing out how, if nothing else, this experience of global confinement had given everyone some free time to stop, take a moment for themselves and reflect? Yes, I was one of those many. The truth is that, as the months went by, all that reflecting did not help me feel any better. Perhaps I did reach a greater awareness in certain respects, that much is true, I took an online course in meditation, one in 3D graphics, one in playing the piano, and I learned to do a handstand, but at what cost? Hours upon hours of introspection do not always lead to easy conclusions, and when you look inside yourself you do not find only what you would like to. In fact, now that we are on the edge of a promising, winking “fresh start,” we find ourselves having to confront tonnes of brand-new insecurities and inner conflicts. If starting again means hitting “reset” and once more taking part in the mad race we were all running, I do not think I want to climb back on board. Of course, I do not mean to stand still and watch the world flow past: this is a moment brimming with potential change and, as it has always been, the task of proposing new scenarios and inspiring unheard-of perspectives falls precisely to art, to those who make it and to those who carry it out into the world. But what do we want this new art to be? What needs does it answer? A little clarity is in order.

Talking online with various artists and creatives from different parts of the world, it emerged that, over that same period, many of them, like me, had begun to sense a certain inadequacy in current aesthetic forms, ever less timely and ever less representative of the now dramatically altered spirit of these times. In recent years, art has embodied an evasive urge to define a transcendent, dystopian future, as an escape from a suffocating and unstable present. The rise of the digital arts, transhumanism, the fascination with certain surreal imaginaries and the constant pursuit of stark contrasts are all expressions of that urge. This is what we asked of the art of the 2010s: to carry us far away, to estrange us and to cut us off from the relentless neurosis of the present. Of the art of the 2020s, by contrast, we can and must ask something different. There is no present to flee, because the present has, in some sense, been suspended. We do not need a transcendent art that projects humanity far away, but rather an immanent art that helps to define a new idea of “here and now”; we need an art capable of inspiring a new way of being in the world, not outside it. We need an art of the present.

Its present, immanent nature could prompt us to take the first steps from the age of appearing to the age of being, encouraging a reunion of the ethical and the aesthetic terms in the equation of what we consider “art.” The consequence would be a radical shift in the common aesthetic paradigm, one essential if the art of the present is to come about: learning to observe and appreciate what is for what it is, and not for what it ought to be (or what we would like it to be), thereby introducing a notion of beauty that is itself immanent, particular, intrinsic to the thing or the subject in question, and that thus departs from the comparative and competitive terms of contemporary aesthetics.

It goes without saying that we are making speculative considerations here; far be it from me to want to impose limits on what an artist should or should not create, or, worse, to pronounce on the legitimacy of certain creative expressions over others. In conclusion, what matters to me is that we begin to trace out a form, a direction and a time in which to describe the art that will answer the need to re-define our post-pandemic contemporaneity. The art of the present, in order to manifest itself in the world, needs to be thought, created and lived.

Tremila, registered at birth as Gino Venezi, is a digital artist, creative director and musician born in 1994. In recent years he has drawn the attention of the art and music world with projects ranging across graphic design, music and the digital arts in a dense exploration of the relationship between technology and identity.