In a splendid centrifugal leap, Werner - Milanese by birth but a New Yorker by choice - decided to sally forth from her own self-sustaining aesthetic dominion and seek out other "researchers" working along the same lines in the boundless landscape of aesthetic individualism, making their way through the contemporary world’s innumerable individual mythologies.

Implicit in this desire of one person to create a foundation was a fruitful shift from the single to the multiple, from the solitary, romantic idea of the artist to that of collective aesthetic research.

The portrait of the contemporary artist is changing significantly. The original myths of homo faber and the artist inspired by supernatural forces are things of the past. To an ever increasing extent, day's artists are researchers whose work, taken as a whole, reveals the coherence of an internal method that proceeds by conceptual insights and keeps in touch with the most advanced scientific communities working in fields related to their own line of research.

One may well ask whether art can and should be on speaking terms with scientific thought today, as it was during the Renaissance, when art was "structurally" science. Over the last three or four hundred years, all of the provinces of culture have indubitably evolved from a pre-scientific, intuitive stage toward scientifically structured disciplines. Yet when we speak of the visual arts, their return to keeping close quarters with science is still greeted with wonder and diffidence, and in some cases rejection, in the name of an alleged total arbitrariness of artistic endeavors.

But what cases are we talking about? Those in which the profit motive prevails over that of research, eschewing any possibility of measuring and evaluating different theories of beauty. As everyone knows, the market and research are in perennial conflict. According to the French philosopher Pierre Lévy, the evolutionary nature and the extreme innovative capacity of western societies derive precisely from a dialectical oscillation between markets and research.

The term "research" implies fundamental concepts that are common to art and science, such as originality, minimalism and cumulativity.

I'd like to dwell a moment on the requirement of cumulativity. In science, it means the capacity to store up and build on experimental results, and it implies an idea of scientific progress (though in the form of periodic revolutions, not of step-by-step progress). In art, it implies an idea of "aesthetic" progress that can be traced through art history and the history of art theories.

In this line of evolution, the value of an individual work of art or of a whole aesthetic theory becomes "measurable" against a wider research context, a "community" in which new experimental hypotheses are presented and choices are made among rival theories, based on internal standards of truthfulness and efficacy.

But can the scientific requirement of cumulativty be adhered to in contemporary art? And how many artists seem aware of and have mastered this analogy? Conversely, to what extent does the old idea of the inspired artist still provide ideological support for the anti-scientific attitude of a good part of the art system? What effects has Francis Fukuyama's theory of "the end of history" had on the history of contemporary art?

The aims of The Salt Queen Foundation have much to do with these questions and with the choice of bringing together in one show four American artists whose ideas are rooted in the most prolific 20th-century European research.

Duchamp's theory of the ready-made appears in Portia Munson's work as a solid platform from which to take wing. A fanatical collector of everyday objects, Munson rearranges scraps of plastic discarded by the industrialized world in a minimalist formal order based on one ironbound criterion: related colors.

Munson takes us into a specific sector of objectivist reality. It has to do with extremely durable - nearly immortal - objects that enchant us with their chromatic, formal and functional richness. The chromatic constraint has an ideological background; if green suggests all that recalls or simulates nature - from laundry detergent containers to weedcutters, from dinosaurs to garden furniture - pink illustrates the western concept and preconception of womanliness, from beauty cases and kinky hair brushes to Barbie dolls and kitchen gloves.

Her installations have been defined by American critics as the new "still life" in the era of technical reproducibility. Her aim seems to be to explore the dual track of politics and beauty, where aesthetics becomes the crossroads where feminist issues, environmentalism and a fundamental criticism of industrialization meet.

On the historical front of expressive abstinence, which runs from Futurism to monochrome theory to Conceptual Art, Roxy Paine has developed a device that automatically produces a jet of color which, as it solidifies, turns into monochromatic abstract sculpture.

Apropos of devices that once switched on, take on a life of their own, one thinks immediately of robots. The technocratic, engineering side of western society has produced marvels of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. In art, an echo of the revolt of objects sung by Mayakovski has produced Tinguely's self-destructing machines, an iconographic expulsion from painting around 1960 (the two years of the central-European "Monochrome Malerei), and the more recent self-generating fractal and stochastic works (generated from sorting algorithms, as in Stochastic Painting).

Paine's work is thus at once device, process and sculpture. The artist-builder, who even designed a machine called the "Scumak" (short for "sculpture-making"), refrains from any influence over the machine except the choice of color and the quantity of colored matter to be spewed out over a certain amount of time.

But is the viewer supposed to think that the machine has a creativity potential of its own? Or that the work of art is a mechanistic parody of the functioning of the human body in its manifold introjective and digestive phases? Or that in the last analysis, creativity always has something to do with chance?

By forswearing a godlike attitude toward his materials, Paine obtains an explosive effect: the pictorial-sculptural form stretches out in a titanic effort to display its own useless beauty.

If Paine relieves the artist of the task of having to be expressive at all costs, leaving the imperative of creativity to the computer, Bill Thompson seems to have a different idea in mind: get rid of the incumbent presence of the observer, who, with his critical or sentimental judgment, has a compelling need to interact intensively with an aesthetic stimulus. Thompson himself describes his best installation as a group of works that came into being "while no one was watching."

Thompson's stated solipsism has to do with a zero degree of perception, or, rather, with a three-way perceptive ruse - tactile, visual and olfactory - played on the unfortunate viewer. Tactile, because the apparent softness of the surfaces is a mischievous invitation to our hands; visual, because the paint sprayed in twenty layers seems to be liquid but is actually solid; olfactory, because we imagine an odor of chemical candy emanating from each work, but it leaves no trace of fumes.

In his neat studio, crammed with industrial paints and dyes, the artist - armed not with palette and brushes but with a body-shop paint sprayer - is completely enveloped and protected by a work-suit that makes him look like a cleanup man on a nuclear-pollution squad. What inner fear distances Thompson psychologically from his ideal limitless viewers? Not by chance, he works on the minimum alteration of surfaces of lacquered polyurethane, on concave/convex and extroverted/intraverted dichotomies. In his glacial and aseptic works, geometry tries to anthropomorphize itself, while the bright, saturated color re-congeals the body of the work, giving it a high-tech, pearly, chromatically impeccable and winsome finish.

What Bettina Werner has been building for nearly two decades is a solid empire of salt: an empire founded on the minimalist principle that "Less is more," and that crystallizes age-old traits and concepts - intelligence, wealth, preservation - in salt.

Werner's vast aesthetic empire includes monochromes in salt of variously-sized granules and different colors, and extends to sculptures with strong symbolic and biographic connotations, and to daring experiments in jewelry-work. Her concept of empire is a positive one, though, as is borne out by the name chosen for the Salt Queen Foundation, which alludes to the preciousness and regality of all knowledge, with the visual arts arrayed in the front line.

In this show, Werner's new works establish a link among all four of the invited artists. After the (apparently) representational "Salt Woman," "A Big Girl" - a square composition made up of four square monochromes in various shades of pink and sizes of salt, from fine-grained strawberry-pink to large-grained pale pink - gives Werner a conceptual tie to Munson's "Pink Project," Thompson's "Altered Flats" and Paine's red abstractions.

And Werner's "Ab Ovo" - successor of the gigantic red egg cradled in the arms of a tree outside the Foundation's headquarters - is an all-green salt installation (forest green or "blossoming green") in which the egg at the center embodies and explains the title of the show. It alludes to growth in nature and in culture, in particular to the blossoming of artistic research so strongly desired by Werner in this first programmatic exhibitoin organized by the Salt Queen Foundation.