[Previous entry: "Beijing...Cambridge...Dallas..."] [Next entry: "Art Is Inspiration"]

02/20/2005: "Roman Fragments" by Alberto Sughi

I don't know whether the place we have left is more reassuring than the place we are arriving in. The best moment in a trip is when you are on your way, when you are far away from everything. I haven't been so "crazy" as to move back to Rome, after I had lived there from 1948 - 1953 and from 1968 - 1970, prompted by nostalgia or by a search for comforting situations. On the contrary, I am convinced that you can only enter into the heart of things through a process of "malaise". Perhaps this seemed the last opportunity to follow a path that requires a certain dose of energy and youth.



.. .Rome expresses all the contradictions of the country as a whole. It contains something unresolved, chaotic, run-down and disturbing that marks the modern era. It has become very difficult to live there. But it is so ancient and full of hypocrisy that it ends up putting together and mixing up everything. It still exerts a fascination and attraction that cannot be destroyed.


Sometimes I think that a fragment of that crumbling and corroded city of Rome could even appear in one of my paintings. I don't know how. Sometimes I take photographs and then I forget to develop them. My camera is a spyhole when I use it. I hardly ever use the results. My memory is much better at selecting images.

Disorder also affects human relations. You often realise that the desire to be together hides a selfish interest, almost as though friendship itself serves to get somewhere or other. So then I refuse to move from my studio. I imagine a possible relationship with the world through my work.



A new song gets into your head after you've heard it several times. The same thing happens in painting: you need to get used to a style, a painter's work. Many people think that they love art more than they are actually able to recognise it. It is highly probable that, if my figures and their feeling of expectation had not appeared in books, magazines and newspapers, the spark would not have been lit. There is a natural human tendency, which is, nonetheless, deceitful, to give more importance to what has already been consecrated.

When did they start to give me credit? When I had no money at all, everyone wanted hard cash. Then, when I first started earning money, nobody wanted to be paid any more.


"There's lots of time, Professore. Don't be in a hurry. We'll be doing other work for you." I used to live in the country. I could see the landscape from my window. But it was a mysterious, enigmatic landscape. It had a strange, stormy, almost menacing beauty. That series of works culminated in perhaps the most atmospheric painting - two metres wide - that I left in Carpineta. It shows a man in a wheelchair, looking at the horizon. He's being watched by a dog, and is surrounded by a mass of green trees and bushes. It represents paralysis in the face of things, a rigid attitude that extinguishes the will to understand.

Alberto Sughi was born in Cesena in 1928 but has been living in Rome for many years. One of the major Italian artists Sughi is considered to be the leading exponent of the figurative pictorial era in which "Existential Realism" was spoken about.
(For more info on Alberto Sughi see: www.albertosughi.com)

Replies: 3 Comments

on Tuesday, February 22nd, paul douglas said

Albert,your blog is interesting about Rome,a city that I have been to a few times,my first feeling about it when I was there first was, its quite small,one ran into monuments just by walking around,and the second was,this is an empty city,as all the Romans were on holiday,apart from these two recollections,certainly such an ancient place,with such history,continously habitated for over two thousand years,has got to be a strange place,contesting as it does with the aura of a million spirits.Although Ive never heard of you apart from on this site,I take you at your word,you may well be as you say you are,and as you say no one beleives anything about anyone unless they are told to by someone else,mabey you have a book out about your work somewhere,always for me the defining moment in announcing the relative importance or fame of an artist.

on Tuesday, February 22nd, jack the common man said

Alberto you are so pompous get a grip and stop whining, the art world has long ago passed you by and for good reason. Even the world of illustration has no use for your meager talents. Stock image are sold on CD now by the thousands for a few pennies. Your opinions are dreary and your psychological insight is childish at best. You are trying to palm off very uncreative illustration that a minority of decorators would like as something sophisticated and philosophical, "Existential Realism" get a grip, its nonsense. You are free to call your work what ever you like, of course, but the seriousness and the pomposity with which you express yourself demands and answers as mine.

on Monday, February 21st, lyn ford said

P relate to your work and to the sentiments expressed in your art blog here at absolute arts. Please contact me at the email address listed if you are so inclined. I would like to possibly communicate with you and send you some of my work. I am an oil painter living part time in Mexico and part in California. Perhaps you would be interested in viewing some of my work. The muse for the recent body of work was an Italian schitzophrenic living as well in Mexico. This has no specific relationship to my wanting to communicate with you other than thematically I can relate to the focus of the work represented on your site. We are about the same age and the last sentence of your blog resounds in my head.

Cordially, Lyn