There is a startling moment in Satyajit Ray’s Pikoo that came back to me while viewing Primavere del Bianco/Springs in White, curated by Vittoria Biasi (Rabindranath Tagore Centre, until July 15), and again more sharply afterwards while reading Biasi’s note in the catalogue. Ray’s eponymous child-hero is wandering around with felt pens and drawing book in the garden of his house, while his mother is in bed with her lover and his grandfather has just breathed his last. Pikoo, busily sketching flowers, suddenly comes upon a fallen champak blossom and shoots a bemused question at his mother’s bedroom window: “Ma, what colour should I use to draw a white flower?”

In Ray’s brief film, the complicating of Pikoo’s consciousness by sex and death is woven into the child’s puzzlement with having to capture whiteness in a world inevitably soiled by colour. Biasi’s epigraph to the show also speaks of flowers growing towards fullness and decay, and makes us look in a new light at the bowl of white roses near the entrance, or at the rotting white carnations and tube-roses encircling Rita Mele’s female figure of plexiglass, wood and cloth, Totem rito bianco (picture), standing like the ghost of the Venus in Botticelli’s Primavera (echoed in the show’s title): “At birth all flowers are white and they retain the trace of their origin in the colour of their efflorescence.” The fragile thread that we are given to hold on to, as we explore this labyrinth of contemporary Italian art in its myriad forms, is whiteness as both colour and idea. Bringing together 12 eminent artists working with video, film, photography, sculpture, halogen light and optic fibre, and on paper and canvas, Biasi’s intellectually driven curation makes us look at (and for) whiteness, and think about it, as the origin as well as the extinction of the creative process. Fusing colour, space and light, whiteness equally effaces and absorbs, facing the artist as absolute simplicity or the ultimate complexity, as profound solace or even more profound terror.

Primavere del Bianco is a difficult exhibition because it demands that we think as we look, using not only our mind’s eye but also that other faculty memorably called “the eye’s mind” by Bridget Riley, the British painter. The show is difficult also because it slows us down. The best works force us to linger in their meditative spaces, viewing them in relation to one another and as individual creations. The video or film work of Matteo Basilé, Casaluce-Geiger, Andrea Granchi, Ivana Spinelli and Franco Ionda uses incessant repetition, so that we have to sit and watch each cycle of narratives at least once, and ideally several times, for the loops of meaning to emerge. For this to happen, we must surrender to, yet also resist, the hypnotic power of this repetitiveness. A Babel of voices, music and other noises surrounds us as well, an auditory collage of heart-beats, explosions, digital effects and arias, Italian commentary mingling with Japanese news-reading, the distinct elements of which we then have to disentangle and listen to in isolation from the rest as we concentrate on a particular visual sequence.

It is only after we have given them time that the themes begin to emerge. A pig about to be slaughtered defecates in terror and pain as the iconic mushroom cloud blossoms on the other half of the split screen. An artist in his studio — Courbet crossed with Chaplin — moves in rapid little jerks while attempting a self-portrait. A suicide bomber, in nothing but her corset of explosives, wonders what else to wear, throws her arms about like the Vitruvian man, or embraces another female soldier in a deadly embrace that turns them into a Global Pin-Up in pink. In an endless row of identical human cut-outs, just one heart begins pulsating with light as it gets pierced by a gigantic nail; all the cut-outs then tumble through space and gather in a heap of icy shards that brings to mind Caspar David Friedrich’s Sea of Ice.

Video installation has been around for long enough now to have evolved its own conceptual and audiovisual clichés. This show is not entirely free of them, especially in its predictably ambivalent and typically western European, post-9/11 fascination with violence and terrorism. And the clichés of art collect around them a crust of dispensable jargon, which too this catalogue is not free of: ontogenesis, actoriality of the spirit, post-human actionism, dialectical dualities. But thankfully (though rather impolitely, to non-Italian viewers), most of the texts in this show are in Italian, including all captions. So, perhaps unintentionally, the words without meaning become purely visual signs or background noise — which may not be a bad thing, after all.

Yet, when all this post-modernity begins to exhaust the mind and the senses, which then begin to want the simplifying blankness or silence of white, there are Rita Mele, Roberto Pietrosanti, Paolo Radi, Dino Pedriali, Carlo Bernardini and, perhaps most unforgettably, Fabrizio Corneli to turn to for the more ‘traditional’ pleasures. With Mele, Pietrosanti and Radi, whiteness becomes a densely layered medium whose planes, surfaces and textures, especially with paper, fabric and canvas, begin to reveal their depths and contours through a mysterious language of lines, cuts, folds, flaps, clots, stains, wounds and other openings. (Think of Somenath Hore’s Wounds series.) And the movement from the lightness of paper to light itself is inevitable.

Swiftly journeying white light seems to have been trapped in motion as optic fibre in Bernardini’s wooden cages, like Brancusi’s Bird In Space. And these lead to the riveting, yet poignantly simple, beauty of Corneli’s two pairs of human faces crafted out of shadows cast on the wall when white halogen light is made to pass through wafer-thin plates of ingenuously cut-out varnished brass. As one gazes at these pensive faces, the essential nothingness of light and shade, and the patterns they create, seem to grow “to something of great constancy/ But howsoever, strange and admirable.”