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05/05/2006: "The Art of Recollection"

In 1980 I began work on an important narrative cycle Imagination and memory of the family, which was exhibited for the first time at the La Gradiva Gallery, in Rome, the following year.
The real innovation of this work, compared to my previous paintings, consisted in its requiring the aid of my memory, which I had never demanded with such persistence, to recapture all that we had left in our old house; to understand what it was right to leave there, and what we should have brought with us. In this reconstruction it seemed essential, above all else, to capture the sense of dignity that neither discomfort, nor suffering, nor pain, could destroy.




If this dignity is the existential sign of a proletarian society, a comparison with the neurosis that characterises man in a consumer society seems inevitable.
This is not nostalgia. There is no desire to go back to a past life, to revive reassuring places and times. Memory, when linked to nostalgia, is not secular memory, but only generates illusions. I would like to use memory to bring something to the present, so that modern man will know what he has lost without even realizing it, and what price he has been forced to pay to emerge from poverty. I don't know how, but modern man needs to retrieve his integrity, dignity, and humanity, without losing what he has gained. If it is true that the values of Christian ideology found their most natural habitat in peasant life, it was unthinkable that this would not also emerge in my cycle of paintings about the family...



For this reason, it is still difficult for me today to imagine that this pictorial cycle took on the significance of a thematic choice (as some have claimed) that, in some ways, would break with, or even counteract, my previous work.
I have always tried to conduct a tireless investigation into man’s condition; his existential discomfort, which is evident in apparently reassuring situations. For instance, in 1967, when I painted a man's portrait, entrenched behind lines of televisions, refrigerators, heaters and telephones, I wanted to represent the danger that man would run, if he did not understand in time that he should not glorify a well-being that was entrapping him.



Well-being should be used to live better. You shouldn’t sell your life in order to obtain it. So, in 1976, when I painted the Supper cycle, I made that man's portrait again, amazed that he had not understood in time that he was even losing the recollection of his ancient dignity. His loss of 'memory' became the most alarming sign.
And in the cycle entitled Imagination and memory of the family I have tried to represent this lost memory. I have not portrayed a peasant family, but have tried to recover our recollections.








Alberto Sughi (Rome, May 2006)
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com

Replies: 6 Comments

on Friday, May 19th, Nita Jawary said

Hello Alberto,
Thank you for sharing your art and your thoughts with us. I find your work very evocative.
Well done,
Nita

on Friday, May 19th, Lile Elam said

Alberto,

Thank you so much for sharing this art. It caught my eye because I too grew up in a poverty situation. While we were really poor, (my mother divorced my father at a time when this was not a common thing to do in the deep south) and life was very hard, so many good things are remembered. There are also so many intense memories of times when we had little food and were all keeping warm by sleeping in the same bed together...

Mom had four of us to care for without much assistance from my father. It was like there was a constant battle going on between my parents. My father remarried shortly after the divorce and was living a middle to upper class life while we were living in poverty. It was hard for me to understand why this was... but I am still so glad that I chose to be raised by my mom. There were many legal battles faught in court over who would raise us. I think there must have been a strong lack of trust on both sides of my parents towards each other. Dad would have a hard time sending monthly support checks (because of anger and wanting to hurt mom) so we would go without. And mom would take him to court and have him jailed for not sending the checks.

There are times when our mother suffered from major depression too so our living situation at times was truly in need of help. My first memories are actually of the orphanage that we went to when I was 2 years old. Mom had won the divorce lawsuit and custody of us but then suffered a major breakdown and ended up in the hospital. Instead of our going to be with our Dad, a priest helped mom by taking us in and keeping us til she came back to the world. The only thing that brought her back was the knowledge that she had 4 children to raise and that she loved us very much and wanted to be here for us.

My first memory was of my mother leaving the orphanage after visiting us. I stood by the house I was living in and cried as she left walking down a driveway towards an awaiting car . She asked me what I wanted and I told her I just wanted to be with her. She smiled and then turned and left...

My next memory was of the old floor lenolium of the old house we were living in after she got us out of the orphanage. We were living in the old family house where Mom was born. The house was really old/ancient and in really bad repair and a few years later was condemed after we had a chimney fire. Our only source of heat was from burning wood in the fireplaces. I guess that fire actually saved us as we had to move because of it! :) It wasn't til later, after Mom's death that I recalled the lenolium.... My siblings and I had to go and rescue the things in the house before it was sold by auction due to her family not being willling to pay the taxes and upkeep of the place. I saw the same lenolium then and it brought back so many memories of our life there... We were able to save many family treasures... trucks of letters and photographs that told the story of my mother's family.

Recalling the past through art is a wonderful way to heal and rise up from past hardships. I think it also helps us to accept the past for what it was and to let it go, moving forward with our lives. Remembering also helps us to honor the past and enables us to help others who are living with hardships today. To this day, I am not afraid to help others when I can. I am also not afraid of going to scary places where I might be able to help others... places where even angels might fear to tread.

I know now that I am a stronger person today because of my past. And some day I hope to share more of my life's experiences through my art and writing. They are afterall, what inspired me to persue my art and helped me to become the artist that I am. This will also give me a way to honor my mother and my life with her. She was a really brave and amazing woman even though she had so many challenges to overcome in her life. She was also an artist... a musician.

My father was an artist as well... and I truly feel blessed to have had both parents in my life. Someone once told me that we choose our parents when we are born... and I know that in my heart, that I chose well. I wouldn't be who I am today if it weren't for both of my parents and the love they had for me (and I for them).

Art helps us to bring into the light experences that are sometimes very dark. By shining the light on these experiences, we can begin to understand them... and the human condition. Hopefully this understanding will help us all to arrive at a better place (in mind, body & spirit) than we were before. And prehaps it will also help us to have more compassion towards others as well as ourselves.

-lile

*********/artist of art.net
www.art.net

on Monday, May 8th, Brad Michael Moore said

In my imagination, I have used parameters suggested by your efforts to communicate via your canvas… A reconstruction, an existential discomfort with a somewhat disassociated dignity. It was all represented by a household - a family, who lived there and who eventually became the dust of passing time. How that time passed created the jest of the exercise. If only I had a hammer…

on Sunday, May 7th, Ron Massey said

Alberto,
I was interested to read what you had to say about nostalgia , and in general, I agree with you. I do think however that it’s an inescapable part of human nature , a symptom of a built in survival mechanism in which our mind is continually sorting memories and editing them in a way which makes it possible to move on and live with ourselves in a reasonably amiable way. So a balance has to be found between integrating one’s nostalgia and keeping it on firm reins. If you don’t do the first you can end up with a life of dry sterility, not the second then indeed as you say, you can wander down a slippery path of illusion. which when misused in extreme cases, can become a collective contagion leading inevitably to human misery. In your own country there was a fairly good example of that in Mussolini and there are plenty of examples today living completely in a world of of self-edited mythology. The only way further is probably as you describe it, retrieving the essence of those important human factors being lost, which are necessary for any real evolution to take place,… but I don’t think we can have it both ways, some of what we have gained, we’ll have to give up, mostly through fairer re- distribution, and that will not just be material wealth. I have to say however that the treadmill of linear-thinking insanity that we like to call our economics is gaining rather than losing popularity in the world, so I’m not really optimistic that you or I will see the changes.
Your images represent the blog excellently, especially the contrast of the loving service of washing another’s tired feet, and the man surrounded by his possessions sitting in his twilight gloom staring into empty space.

on Friday, May 5th, viana re said

I would love to see more because I loved it
Very good drawing

on Friday, May 5th, Markus Kruse said

How true, how true!!!