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03/08/2006: "What I love most of all about painting." by Alberto Sughi
Let us take some examples here and there. I believe that the whole of American informal painting has had a great influence on Italian figurative art. I have loved painters like Rothko and Rauschenberg; At the Biennale exhibitions I skipped all the other paintings and only studied one or two to understand them well, and to understand the innovations they contained. It is difficult to select by artistic movement in a society such as this, where everything is mixed up.
The art critic Crispolti, when he wrote an article about me, spoke of my “Informal derivation”, because I don't remove all my sketched lines, in contradiction with the details of the more finished paintings, making no sense if not inserted into a fabric that involves them, into a framework that either overpowers them, or makes them come to life. 
To understand this, you need to understand when a painter decides that a painting is finished. Some of my paintings could appear to be unfinished works, like something that I have not managed to complete. Some parts of paintings are very well-defined, others hazy, others left vague and full of sketched lines. It may also be that I have not managed to resolve the incongruities, since I am not able to resolve them in my mind, and I leave the contrasts between them, like many things in my life that I have not been able to reconcile. I leave a few spurious lines, dirt marks. At times, when I’m explaining how I paint, I say that I should start from the dust left by the charcoal, the fusaggine, the dirty rags of color, the messy hands, a confusion that I try to dominate and that, while I am painting, becomes increasingly evident around me, even the piles of brushes that I no longer clean. I realize that, in one of my so-called creative moments, the dirty brushes multiply from 3 to 7, 10, or more, and I stop when I can no longer think of anything else to add. The painting is finished when the path has no further turnings to explore. What does this mean? That the painting is finished when your journey inside the painting is over. The painter has finished at his journey’s end. The meaning is part of a fantastic adventure. You think you are arriving who knows where, even if you know that, if everything is as it should be, you will actually get to the places you know best.
I loved Ben Shahn when I was a boy, then I discovered other American painters. I was not so keen on Hyper-realism, and I don't consider it Realist. There is Realism in so much American Pop Art, in Rothko, for instance: his idea of space, his extraordinary relationship with a wall that finally finishes in a dark line; Segal, for me, has concentrated too much on mechanical things, and has taken both the Hyper-realist movement and metaphysics to exasperation. The mould, that gesture, that object removed from its normal and well-formed context in a way that increasingly resembles something by Duchamp, even if Segal is considered completely different from him, he is, nevertheless, linked to the avant-garde. I see him as a man unto himself, halfway between the historical avant-garde and Metaphysics, who has had so many mediocre imitators all over the world. Everything that painting doesn't need, in one way or another, I don't know why, ends up being painted. 
Hamilton is a painter who has transparency, distant horizons. I see in the cinema amazing possibilities. Some English and Irish directors have done incredible things, have almost gone into competition with Impressionist painting, with light, time, the endless expanse of space, without usurping the world of painting. Impressionist paintings are not beautiful because of their ability to gather colors and light. In fact, they have always had hazy textures, with the consistency of the surface of paint. Instead of always talking about the discovery of light, to love the Impressionists we should remember much more about their relationship with Velazquez, for instance, and the landscape of Saragozza. Manet is more clearly referable to Velazquez, but they all show his influence. If only painting could think about retracing this road, to realize that painting is painting. I get excited when I start to speculate about how Velazquez painted; 
I wonder how he held his brush, how he worked. If painting doesn't have the lightness that comes from the hands, not from the head, and here I return to the great seduction of craftsmanship, if we don't bear this in mind, then we are just using painting for other purposes, in different areas, using it as provocation. 
If you look carefully at Caravaggio you realize that it is painted with nothing. If you see it in a photograph and then you see it close up, you realize that the movements that he had to make in order to paint were certainly much simpler, more obvious and natural than they appear in the painting as a whole. Painting is a strange thing. If you let it become too intellectual it loses its identity. Painting is not expressed by what it represents: it is a thing that is made. I have always loved Caravaggio very much, not to imitate him, but to understand the movements of his way of painting. Alberto Sughi (Rome, March 2006)
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com
