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11/07/2005: "The gesture of the painter (Part One)"
I want to paint a man talking. So you can see all his teeth. I want it to be the portrait of someone who feels satisfied because he knows how to choose his words. Typical of a class that I don't like much, who talks of territories, districts, of exploiting and profit-sharing. But really he’s a cynic. He doesn't believe.
I don't like the way the picture is turning out. His open mouth talking is so different from how I imagined it would be; and then you can’t listen to what he is saying. That’s it: you ought to be able to hear him speak; but then someone would like it. And that mustn’t happen.
And so I take my time and paint the background: some pink, a lot of grey.
But the eyes are right. The nose, the mouth: they are all right. What’s missing? I get the idea that the open mouth could be swallowing something, instead of speaking, so I draw a hand bringing a bun to his mouth. Now I like the idea of the painting. It’s very rough. Doing it quickly helps to capture the liveliness of an expression, of a movement. The vague outlines give us a glimpse of a wide range of possibilities. They are lines that don't confine the image.
I leave the picture in this state. I will think about it later. For now, I am satisfied that I have created something to be pleased with. 
Today I take another canvas and sketch a woman eating, with a large mouthful puffing out her cheeks. I think about not giving too much importance to the meaning, or the story. I want to paint the act of eating as if I was painting a still life. I don't want to represent a purposeful action. But rather a portrait, where the gesture, removed from the reason why it is made, gives physical substance to the figure I’m painting. I put the two pictures next to each other and start to think about painting a buffet supper.
I do other paintings and realise that they could be placed next to each other. The supper would be recreated in the eyes and minds of the spectator. The characters appear alone; it is their belonging to a group, a social class, a rite that is being enacted, which is the only reason for this alienated proximity. They are together because, as individuals, they have the same parameters of cultural background and interest. And these parameters are so much part of their physical being that they emerge, through the material form of their gestures, faces, and clothes.
They are solid and well-defined figures, like geometrical shapes. They don't look at each other, they just are together. Life goes on a long way away from this scene, populated by statues. It is the end of solidarity, the negation of affection. This negation seems to create an impenetrable wall; a wall with no flaws, violently rejecting every weakness. The ideas and thoughts of these dinner-party characters are only physical. The act of eating has become a way of thinking. Their static pose reflects the unshaken moral inertia of their lives. People who have made their protective shell into armour, hiding the emptiness that they carry inside: lack of pity, an ideological void. These "people" are terrible. They can scare you. How can an artist paint in terms of "beauty" and experience an aesthetic attraction for this frozen and violent world? How can the artist take so much care in painting a face, gesture, clothes, when he is well aware that the more detached he becomes from his work, the more successful his painting will be? It is a question of split personality that he experiences, and which makes him determined to carry on a work in which opposites cohabit and interrelate: an optimistic wish to give the form and substance of beauty to a painful and pitiless life that he considers alarming and violent.
I said that I wanted to paint the act of eating, as if portraying a still life. But it actually shows something different and sadder: a still life is the representation of objects that are useful, or that have some kind of relationship with man. Acts belong to man; they are part of man himself. It would therefore be more correct to say, straight away, that I wanted to portray the absence of man. I therefore mean the absence of all the references to ancient art, from museums, that have accompanied me in providing formal, stylistic solutions, and techniques, in my paintings.
These paintings, deriving from a strong obsession with content, could only be successful if conceived inside an eclectic and rigid formalism, that placed the characters in a neutral "space" within history.
This is the space that the dehumanisation of man has always taken within history; when, whether positively or negatively, man has been portrayed in terms of power or impotence. My relationship with neo-classical painting, including evocations of more ancient art (some reference to certain types of light, to certain physical characteristics of the "sacraments" of Poussin, some suggestions of Guido Reni) has therefore been a historical-social interpretation, aimed at understanding better what I wanted to say, and finding the most effective ways of doing it. It has certainly involved a transformation, and the use of light and forms occurs in such an arbitrary way as to appear unfaithful to these references. Nevertheless, they are there, and they are not motivated by any academic nostalgia.
At this point, I have to say what the existence of an avant-garde that has furiously attacked and destroyed any relationship with tradition for over half a century, means to me.
Essentially (strictly within the contest I am here talking about) it means not allowing the modern artist any possibility of a stimulating re-evocation of history and tradition, if he doesn’t want to have to live in a climate of hostility and distrust.
Returning to my work and, above all, to the method with which I have proceeded, I have never liked the use, any use whatsoever, of photographic material. I am convinced that the artist’s memory, draughtsmanship and skill provide a more precise and synthetic image of the idea which he, or she, intends to convey. Precisely by denying recourse to any external documentation, the painter can exploit all his, or her, structural devotion to the image, which neither wishes, nor is able to reproduce reality; but which represents a relationship, a judgement, a criticism of reality.
If a problem of abstraction exists, and has always existed, in painting, it must be identified with the need to remove from painting all those misleading and superfluous elements, from the point of view of judgement, that are also present in a scene, in an event, as they are in real life.
Abstraction, in other words, is the elaboration of a style that gives material substance to the painter’s idea of reality. I have, therefore, worked without the aid of photos, or even of models. I have taken considerable pains to give a correct form to these representations.
I want to examine the method I developed to make the first large-format painting of the supper. I will try to be as precise as if I were writing a diary of my work.
But let us pause for a moment. I believe we first need to ask ourselves a question that requires an answer, if we wish to provide more than a report of what I have called the diary of my work. What is the relationship between the artist and his, or her, paintings? But I shall speak personally. Is this world, in which I try to give substance to an image, something that happens outside and against myself? Something for which I can feel sorrow, fear or condemnation? Or do I paint these pictures as if, looking at myself in the mirror, I see inside me those marks of coldness, those signs of a man imprisoned in a coat of armour?
It could be both of these things. It could be that the artist identifies himself, at the moment in which he’s creating, with the figures that he is painting, just like an actor on stage takes on the character that he is interpreting, even if he has a negative opinion of that character.
But it could be, on the other hand, something quite different; that is, that the artist transfers to an external world, to a social class to which he feels he does not belong because of his cultural identity, the weight of guilt that he cannot bear to recognise in person.
In this case, the artist wishes to transfer his, or her, own psychological problems, from personal experience, to a dimension that takes on a social context. The artist therefore wishes to use his own existential problems to express the characteristics of a social and moral situation. In other words, it is a belief that what has happened inside us is produced in a wider context, and we are only containers of these difficulties in life. We need to ask ourselves if these things are useful or useless, if they are able, that is, to produce an answer, or if they will remain unresolved forever. The "ourselves and others" relationship is the key to our anxiety. It is our awareness of detachment, which we try to overcome through the concept of social behaviour, that gives unity to the loneliness that is tearing us apart. It is an activity that we cannot conduct alone. It is a journey that we take on with others, and within history. But even if it is a clot of existential anxiety that we want to melt by seeking out sociability, it would be an illusion to expect that this act can be controlled by rationality.
Anxiety is irrational; it is always and only something pertaining to the uncertainty of our being. Its emotive potential is compressed by reason; it tries to suffocate its self-destructive tendencies, and to channel them towards something socially profitable. It organises our relationships with the external world, with others. But this relationship cannot naturally turn into an idyll. It could give rise to a painful clash, in which each of the parts looks hopelessly only for reassurance.
Alberto Sughi (nov. 2005)
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com
