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02/20/2005: "Roman Fragments"
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)
